It is an advice for Internet only, right?
Writing one sentence per line
81–90 of 307 posts
Re: Writing one sentence per line
#82This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences.…
I remember reading this as a child (maybe in elementary school) and it affecting my writing. I have to admit, especially when writing something technical, forgetting about this and focusing on making small, easily-understandable sentences can help the reader. (even though it's more boring)
Re: Writing one sentence per line
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's beautiful. To be fair, and are we not all about being fair around here, he explicitly states: > Not publishing one sentence per line, no. Write like this for your eyes only. On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that there should be no spillage between how you write and how you publish. For example, I found "How to live" unreadable partly because of what I suspect this style of writing did to the publis…
GP was echoing the article's point that writing one sentence per line lets you notice, and vary, your line lengths.
Ah. If that's the case (and I can see how it might be) I misunderstood. Thanks.
Re: Writing one sentence per line
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
This would require accurately detecting the end of the sentence which is not an easy thing to do correctly consistently.
Two spaces between sentences makes this easy, and should be just as easy a habit as one sentence per line.
That's about as unnatural for most people as newline per sentence, and has the added risk that you'll accidentally publish like that and it'll look weird. One per line would be _much_ harder to accidentally publish because it's more obvious.
Re: Writing one sentence per line
#85For me context is very important. Separating out the sentences, although makes them stand on their own, often sounds discontinuous and jarring like a too long pause. Not to mention how awkward it looks on the page (if double spaced which I prefer). That's not to say it's a bad technique. It might work for some, not for others. For me it doesn't. I have found writing to be much like coding where if you think through t…
You might have missed a part of the article, where author says they write single line sentences as 'code', but both Markdown and HTML automatically turn concescutive sentences into paragraphs, unless you (using a blank line or
) explicitly end a paragraph.
> Not publishing one sentence per line, no. Write like this for your eyes only.
(Edit: added quote from article)
Re: Writing one sentence per line
#86I personally use this approach but mostly because a lot of what I write ends up in a git repository and diffs make way more sense when there is only one sentence per line. I also find things much easier to manipulate in vim when sentences don't span lines.
Yeah, same here. If you're going to have any text commited to git, it'll work much better if it's one sentence per line. Not that git is great for prose, but it kinda does the job and I don't need to have a new tool. Hammers, nails.
> Not that git is great for prose, but it kinda does the job and I don't need to have a new tool.
Is there really something better? Git is pretty great in general, and prose doesn't seem like there'd be much room for improvement in tooling. I'm not a writer really though, so maybe I'm missing something?
Re: Writing one sentence per line
#87Tangentially related:
"Omit needless words."
-William Strunk, The Elements of Style
Highly recommended book for anyone who wants to be a more effective writer.
Re: Writing one sentence per line
#88I had copied this Emacs macro just for doing that.
;; one sentence per line (defun wrap-at-sentences () "Fills the current paragraph, but starts each sentence on a new line." (interactive) (save-excursion ;; Select the entire paragraph. (mark-paragraph) ;; Move to the start of the paragraph. (goto-char (region-beginning)) ;; Record the location of the end of the paragraph. (setq end-of-paragraph (region-end)) ;; Wrap lines with 'hard' newlines (i.e., real line breaks). (let ((use-hard-newlines 't)) ;; Loop over each sentence in the paragraph. (while ((global-set-key (kbd "M-j") 'wrap-at-sentences)
Re: Writing one sentence per line
#89“Words are not forms of a single word.
In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.
The world must be measured by eye.”
- Wallace Stevens
Re: Writing one sentence per line
#90Just please, for the love of god, don't do it in slack. Nothing annoys me more than a colleague writing a long slack message when I'm AFK, and having my watch buzz like an angry bee when they hit one carriage return (and send a new slack message) every 10 seconds.