> 5. A semantic line break SHOULD occur after an independent clause as punctuated by a comma (,), semicolon (;), colon (:), or em dash (—).
Uh oh, that’s incompatible with standard em dash usage, which is with no surrounding whitespace.
(I’m designing a lightweight markup language of my own, and it’s tempting to special-case an em dash at the end of a line that is not preceded by a space, to join to the next line without inserting a space, but I’ve been trying to avoid nuance in rules. But I definitely do want to put line breaks after em dashes sometimes.)
According to Wikipedia: "Dashes have been cited as being treated differently in the US and the UK, with the former preferring the use of an em dash with no additional spacing and the latter preferring a spaced en dash."
Though I prefer the spaced en dash myself, and I am in the UK, I think there's probably a lot of variation on both sides of the Atlantic.
A hairline space between em-dashes can be quite visually pleasing (in American writing; British uses full spaces around en-dashes). Like what Medium does.
But in that case I would prefer that the source text still has no spaces. Such things can be added in postprocessing.
SemBr author here. I chose SHOULD NOT for this rule for a couple reasons: First, as an affordance for text with ambiguous or unknown meaning. Second, as a hedge against introducing new meaning unintentionally.
Adding a semantic line break inherently changes the relationship between words, and we can't always be sure about the intended meaning of text. If this were MUST NOT, then any modification would risk violating the spec.
Then again, this may be my own, idiosyncratic reading of RFC 2119. If you'd like to discuss this further, feel free to open an issue on the GitHub repo here: https://github.com/sembr/specification/issues
I 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.
Yes, but I still find it more convenient to have sentences on their own line. Vim's sentence text object does also not always correspond correctly to actual sentences.
> diffs make way more sense when there is only one sentence per line
I did the same thing for some time for papers at university for the same reason. It used to annoy me, because I hate to change for my tools, I rather have my tools support my workflow: There should be a nicer diff for that.
You could write a script which replaces the end of sentences with a new line and use git hooks[0] to run it before every commit. You wouldn't have to write any differently.
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.
Two spaces between sentences is how I've always typed them, even if it's in HTML or MD or other forms that will condense them into a single space in the final render. The two spaces mark a clear intent to end a sentence instead of a period to punctuate an abbreviation.
Many people learned to add two spaces to the end of each sentence which is now built in to their muscle memory. My father learned to type adding two spaces to the end of every sentence, they tried to teach that to me in computer class in middle school but since I had a lot of experience typing already without it I never felt motivated to change my habit to add two spaces. I never really saw the point, in most formats I can't see the two spaces.
Two spaces after each sentence comes from typewriters, where it supposedly looked better. On computers it made sense in the time of monospaced fonts, but with "modern" fonts being able to control the amount of space behind punctuation it's largely redundant.
Good typography seems to dictate a wider space after a sentence than between words. So this is a typewriter habit to mimic that kind of thing (like the sibling noted).
Rendering engines can do anything they want. The question is about source representation only, for semantic purposes. That has nothing to do with output representation. Even practicaltypography completely misses that distinction.
You wouldn't publish anything with line breaks between sentences either. Double spacing or line breaks both work nicely for semantic purposes because html (or markdown which almost always ends up displayed somewhere as html) will ignore it.
Any print publishing software in the 21st century should be aware that two spaces in a prose text source is a hint for a sentence break, and treat it appropriately. They often apply custom spacing (slightly more than 1, but nowhere close to 2) between sentences anyway. Without the two spaces, they have to algorithmically guess at sentences. You just won't notice when there are sentence detection errors, unless you're a typography fanatic; who's going to notice 1 space instead of 1.2 or whatever the optimum happens to be?
The period also indicates the previous word was abbreviated, or can be used in an ellipsis, probably other situations that aren't top of mind right now.
> Good typography seems to dictate a wider space after a sentence than between words.
You:
> Rendering engines can do anything they want. The question is about source representation only, for semantic purposes.
The thread you’ve commented on is literally about rendering, not source representation and semantics. I agree that you can use a double-space as a sentence delimiter, but we’re currently discussing whether it’s “good typography” to render it that way.
Your reply cited Butterick which doesn't distinguish the two issues. Every "authority" I've seen strongly admonish against the use of two spaces fails to make this distinction. Which is why I emphasized it.
I don't think there's much dispute that two spaces is too much in modern properly rendered prose, so I don't know who "we" is. (And anyone who does think two word spaces is just fine, would probably also agree that it should be configurable and not dependent on two spaces in the source text.)
If there's a text renderer out there that renders two spaces as two word spaces in prose, that should be patched, not writers' brains.
Those authorities on "good typography" are wrong. They prioritize text looking pretty over text conveying information clearly and accurately, and the world is worse off because of it. Two spaces as the sentence delimiter is superior in every way that actually matters, and I will die on that hill.
Take a ruler to some text that's traditionally typeset and you'll notice that the width of the whitespace after a sentence end is slightly wider than the space between words. That's either an em space or an en quad. Between-word spacing would be about 1/2 an en.
Studies examining whether or not wider spacing between sentences improved readability have been inconclusive.
There is one good reason to use two spaces between sentences, at least for text that's going to be processed automatically. It can be very difficult for software to know whether a given punctuation mark is the end of a sentence or something else, like an abbreviation. GNU Emacs, for example, is (or was) coded to recognize sentences by looking for two spaces after a ., ?, or !.[1]
For me it's a holdover from a high school typing class, but I find it useful. I mostly write in LaTeX which just ignores the extras. On the iphone, two spaces are replaced by a period and a space, which is quite handy.
Yeah I believe this is a generational thing. I learned double-space as well, but pretty sure not long after me they stopped teaching that, and I've totally stopped doing it.
Double spaces was the norm on (almost always monospaced font) typewriters [EDIT: in English]. I assume it lingered on computers until sometime in the 80s but was shifting especially once proportional fonts for written material (other than things like code of course) became the norm.
I was taught to use double spaces in highschool typing class (we used electric typewriters with the buffer off). In the ~35 years since I have only ever met a handful of people, all older than me, who did it in practice.
I continued through university while using a computer to type things up, I'm pretty sure my thesis had double spaces after periods, written in WP. Once I graduated I dropped it pretty quickly.
Was there an early version of Word's spell-check-on-the-fly that underlined double spaces, or am I miss-remembering?
Apparently you could set up one or two spaces depending on your preference, however recent versions of Word now mark double spaces as an error by default.
I am an oldster, but never used two spaces. Probably because I never did typing lessons at school (hell I don't think it was even an option at my schools - computers hardly featured either).
Fair point, but I still prefer the solution of just putting in a new line myself. Then I don't have to worry about maintaining such a script, setting up the git hook, etc.
There is! If you're using Git, you can do git diff --word-diff to enable word mode, which is computationally more expensive, but computing power is cheap these days. There's also an "ignore whitespace" mode (-w), though that doesn't play well with Python.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all different. You are in a little maze of twisty passages, all different. You are in a little maze of twisting passages, all different.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all different. You are in a[-little-] maze of twisty {+little+} passages, all different. You are in a[-little-] maze of [-twisting-]{+twisty little+} passages, all different.
You are in a {+little+} maze of twisty[-little-] passages, all different. You are in a little maze of twisty passages, all different. You are in a little maze of [-twisting-]{+twisty+} passages, all different.
You are in a {+little+} maze of [-twisty little-]{+twisting+} passages, all different. You are in a little maze of [-twisty-]{+twisting+} passages, all different. You are in a little maze of twisting passages, all different.
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?
At least with a controlled circle of people who respect that, say, handing off a doc to an editor means they shouldn't make inline changes any longer, collaborative doc editing like Google Docs.
As the above implies, you don't have great version control and some of the process management is manual. But it works well for people accustomed to working that way and it's much more familiar for people who don't regularly use git (or use it at all).
I mean, I’m happy that this was not a yet another sysadmin/programmer-as-writer justification (adjusting one’s whole workflow based on the handful of terminal programs that one uses).
EDIT: Meaning that I think this kind of justification is more interesting since it is meant to affect the process of writing itself.
I won't say I'm not guilty of that too sometimes. Although I don't think it's so bad. If there's a tool that you really like using that can be adapted to work in a variety of scenarios, I can understand the justification. For some of the things I do, there probably are better tools for the job, but if I can make use of existing tools I already know how to use well, even if in a suboptimal way, that might be more worthwhile to me than investing in learning something new.
This 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. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.
So I write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. Don’t just write words. Write music.
Yes, and the hyperlink for "vary the lengths of our sentences" in the linked-to essay goes to another essay, by the same author - https://sive.rs/book/WritingTools - which includes that Gary Provost "tour de force".
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 published product.
Writing like this works really well for vim and git as well. It makes it easy to delete/move/edit lines (eg with: d2j), and then in git the diffs are by default formatted nicely and contain only sentences.
Though if you wanted to get fancy you could use other vim movement commands (yank the next 2 sentences), I still think it's easier using lines.
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)
Technical text has an excuse to be boring and repetitive. The content is king, clarity and lack of ambiguity are the next most important things, and style is just a fourth place contender.
EDIT: I just want to point that differently from this thread, the article is not about text style.
A paragraph with just one 50-word sentence doesn't have varied sentence length either ;)
For technical writing, "no more than one thought per sentence" works quite well in my opinion. Or at least it's a good guideline to apply in the first pass of proofreading.
I agree with no more than one thought per sentence in general, though I have the opposite problem: it often takes me several paragraphs to get a single thought across. So the end result ends up being something like 0.1 thoughts per sentence.
I guess what I'm trying to get across is not a single
thought but a perspective which requires some background and context to appreciate, and I struggle with separating out the essential from the incidental, and structuring it for maximum engagement.
I struggle with this, too. I'm just very verbose. I try to keep this piece of advice about working to shorten a text in mind: it's done, not when there is nothing more to add, but when nothing more can be removed. (Saint-Exupery, I believe). It helps me a little bit.
Reading this makes me angry at all my school teachers for the subjects of [my-native-language] and writing.
It is such a simple technique, that makes such a huge impact on ones writing, and yet no teacher bothered to teach it.
I spent all my school years writing monotonous essays of five-word sentences.
Week after week I would make another one, and I could clearly see for myself that they were bad, I just couldn't tell why.
So when I asked my teachers for help, asking "what is wrong with my writing?", "what am I missing?", all I ever got back was a bad grade and the same useless tip: "just read more".
They might just as well have said to "draw the rest of the fucking owl."
Reading more is the best way to learn though. Having good examples to imitate and build off of make writing clear, engaging prose much easier. When my math teachers told me "just do the practice problems", I also thought they were idiots, but they were actually right...
Reading more is good, but what if the teacher had pointed out the sentence length and told the student to start reflecting on sentence length while reading?
Outside of classroom-style dedicated instruction, this really does seem to be the best form of learning, i.e. a semi-active/not-fully-passive approach.
There is generally no "hack" that the student can use to avoid having to read a lot of stuff, in order to learn and especially to become an expert. What a student needs to read, isn't necessarily textbooks or the traditional orthodoxy of materials, but still there is undoubtedly a lot of reading that must be done, to "get good" as they say.
That being said, for a teacher to GUIDE that reading, to give some hints, pointers, themes, interconnections, sequencing (start with X, then read Y to deepen your knowledge of X), etc., is absolutely invaluable.
To me, this seems like the Pareto-optimal 80/20 breakdown, where 20% of the teacher's investment in time and energy can get you 80% of the benefit of having teaching at all (i.e. don't need a full curriculum or full-time commitment to dedicated instruction, but do need to spend some time/energy pointing the student in various directions and giving them some ideas to think about while reading).
This is all brushing up against the central theme of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", which approaches its core thesis by dissecting the process of teaching college students how to "write Quality".
Reading as a reader is kinda different than reading as a writer. Different mind states. As a reader I'm getting lost in a story, not picking up on writing styles and patterns. You're not wrong. Just need the caveat of reading with the intention (or partial intention) to pull yourself out of the story and check out the architecture.
It’s useless advice to a student asking for specific help. A cooking student asking “why is my rice always soggy” should hear “let’s start by examining how much water you’re using”, not “watch more cooking shows until you understand through osmosis”.
The point of a teacher is to teach. If the only guidance they can muster is “consume more of what you’re trying to create”, there’s no point to having a class.
This is a problem with most advice on English writing. They only teach you how to write as at a level that a 8 years old reader would understand. Most modern books, fiction or not, are written at a juvenile level, at the formal request of publishers. As a result, the level of reading and comprehension for most people has decreased to a level that is lower than in any other literate society.
> they only teach you how to write as at a level that a 8 years old reader would understand.
Many if not most modern writing advice will remind you to focus on your audience.
Most audiences aren't composed of eight year olds.
So it isn't true that most advice suggests writing for eight year olds.
> As a result, the level of reading and comprehension for most people has decreased to a level that is lower than in any other literate society.
We track statistics like reading comprehension and you can look them up.
I did.
The source I found showed that every state in the US I checked - with the exception of Michigan (??) - has reading comprehension improve relative to the year 2003.
In some cases this improvement is by a notable amount, in some cases not so notable.
It seems unlikely to me that people now are worse at reading and writing than people used to be.
Writing is more common now and reading is more common too.
Once, journalists wrote.
Now everyone does.
>So it isn't true that most advice suggests writing for eight year olds.
That may be true although I can tell you from personal experience that writing optimizers for places like trade press sites absolutely push you towards more basic language, shorter sentences, etc. One site in particular I used to write for sometimes told me every single time that I should basically dumb down my prose. And I don't write in a particularly literary way and I've pretty much never had this feedback from human editors.
>Once, journalists wrote. Now everyone does.
Interesting observation. At one point, most business people above a certain level were "writing" by dictating to their secretaries which is a completely different mode of getting information onto a page.
I believe you.
Medium is the message is a term from media theory.
It refers to the idea that messages aren't in a vacuum, but are shaped by where they are transmitted.
Often that shape is a function of what the audience will find appealing.
You can tie this sort of thing to bellman equations to get a mathematical grip on the effect.
It does exist.
It can be as harmful as you think it is.
Yet it isn't harmful everywhere - isn't the world at large without any variation.
It is intimately tied to the environment you are in, because that environment produces the rewards.
Different environment, different reward, different impact on your writing.
The effect is local, not global.
Which means you get to have a superpower.
When you have a bad transformation that degrades thinking that makes the term "medium is the message" feel dangerous.
So you get things like Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death.
I think your post is an example of the same type of fear.
This focus - on the examples of times where things are negative - it misses the opportunity.
Since messages are a function not of raw ideas, but of their audiences you have an incredible power.
Choose the right audience.
Set the expectation for evaluation in advance.
Pick the medium that helps you to think clearly and makes it easy to be judged.
Now, instead of being destroyed by your incentive environment, you get empowered by it.
Take a look at Amazon's writing culture for an example of that.
Or more broadly, the many companies which chose to ban powerpoint for reasons which are fundamentally related to what I'm talking about.
We're not worse at understanding writing than ever before.
We're more advanced than ever before, because we stand atop the giants that came before us.
Yet at the same time - we're not, because that too is local and not global.
The future is often already here, but isn't evenly distributed.
I think you’re both making good points in this thread. I’m writing a non-fiction book in my spare time, and I’ve had to face the fact that my default get-words-on-the-page is extremely flowery.
Would it be possible for you share an example of your prose that received this criticism?
He is not saying short sentences are necessary, he is saying that each sentence stands out with a newline, which means they can be judged at an individual level.
I'm gonna be honest, my mind got bored in the long sentence and completely skipped like half the words. I think I'm just too used to reading documentation and skipping 50% of the words so I can see how to do something quicker.
I had the same experience when my brain decided that I get the point of the sentence and where it was going. Perhaps if there was actual content in the sentence this wouldn’t have happened.
The most fascinating experience is trying to understand Schopenhauer in German and then reading the same paragraph in an English translation. It feels pre-digested or narrowed down to one possible interpretation.
A professor at college tried to hone into us the short-precise nature of English as a cultural phenomenon and considered the paragraph long highly artistic German texts a reflection of a culture that felt the need to impress.
Still to this day, I admire both: the sophisticated elaborate construction of long flowery sentences that strain your memory as well as the ultra-concise that brilliantly clear short (often technical) prose.
What is this obsession with writing not being boring? If you're reading the passphrase to disarm a nuclear missile do you think you might get bored halfway if the sentences are too long?
I never understood why people insist on having short sentences. Human thought does not come in a small pre-packaged short sentence form. Some of the best philosophers wrote very long sentences, look at Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant. Let's not dumb ourselves down by sacrificing rich, deep thoughts just because our ADHD might kick in and we might get distracted by the next YouTube cat video.
The semicolon is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. That makes your example 5-10-5 words instead of 5-5-5-5. Try using a period instead of semicolon and hear how it sounds.
What difference does it make? They are multiples of five. Are they okay to him? I doubt that is so. He dislikes chunks of five. He was not prescribing semicolons. That would still bother him.
I think you might be missing the forest for the trees, here. It's not about five-word sentences; it's about the repetition making the paragraph as a whole monotonous and robotic - something you demonstrated very well in this very comment.
The OP primed you to read it robotically. I'll admit my sentences seem somewhat contrived though.
I was delighted when I first read the short, punchy, and somewhat dislocated clauses of The Stranger by Camus. Actually, a more pertinent example is the first page or so of Molloy by Samuel Beckett. Maybe the reader is supposed to be bored; I find it refreshing.
it makes no difference tbh how varied the sentence length is or other aesthetic factors. nothing is reliably been shown to make writing more successful.
This was the rule in the 1980s when using nroff and it's a habit I developed when using any markup. It's good to know that it's been rediscovered again as newcomers mature in their tool use.
I started doing this mostly for cleaner commits in version control systems. After a while I also noticed it made the writing more concise. It's much easier to spot redundant "filler" sentences.
Most writing style rules are context-dependently apt. The quote by Disruptive_Dave of Gary Provost rings true for artistic writing. Sentence length limits are more helpful for technical writing like papers/documentation, with its many side-details - just as a complexity control.
Either way, though, for sentence source formatting, sentences on line boundaries also help version control systems since a diff shows the delta on a per sentence basis. Note that this is slightly different than one per line - it is more integer number of lines per sentence since some are multi-line. Same ethos, though.
I approach this by separating writing from editing. Just keep writing, ignore the typos, self-censorship or formatting and keep moving.
So, I've build myself an app to make that easier. Essentially, it's just a more stupid version of a text box. It's free, it's private, and it's meant to put you in the state of flow.
I've been using it every day for the past 3 years or so and I know that some people find it useful too, but even if I was the only user, I'd still be quite happy with it, since I suck at sticking with habits :)
Sweet! If you don't mind sharing, did anyone donate through ko-fi?
I think there's still potential in writing tools with decent UX (iA Writer and such) and I know that some people wanted to pay me for Enso, so I'm trying to figure out the best course of action: either charge premium for a premium native app or let the people chip in. Paid products tend to get more valuable feedback.
Here’s my biggest critique of Enso:
It’s not very easy to send myself a reminder when I’m back at my computer to use it.
Content: i’m currently on my mobile phone and I absolutely adore the idea of Enso (funny enough I’m currently holding & feeding my infant named Enzo). I would like to write with it and try it when I don’t have an infant on my lap but that requires me remembering it and looking it up when back on my laptop and ready to write something.
I added my email on the mobile sign-up but frankly I don’t really want a mobile app as 60% of my long-form mobile writing is done via voice to text and edited later. What I’d like is a “remind me via email to give Enso a try” signup that says “hey, this is a reminder to try Enso… The flow focused, low editing app for creative writing” or something like that.
I like this. Thanks! Email notifications nowadays are a bit of a pain to set up, since they need to contain the physical address of the sender in the footer, so this is a piece of work I _always_ keep postponing. I was even considering dropping that form completely. Maybe I could generate a calendar event with a reminder instead? This way I won't have to store any data about the user and I could probably piggy back on the phone UX when it comes to reminders. Just thinking aloud here.
> as 60% of my long-form mobile writing is done via voice to text and edited later.
Yeah, your description matches my own usage patterns. And, I've reached a similar conclusion. Mobile-first Ensō would probably have two modes: keyboard + dictation.
Go get convertkit. It's bloody awesome, cheap, and they even have an address of their own that you can use if you don’t wqnt to share your physical address.
The sequenced auto responders that they have boost my open and click rates as much as 300% and allow for some truly powerful/complex programmatic features that anyone who's on HN would love.
It's a user experience thing. Too often product designers (myself especially) think that a user should remember/do an action/etc. However, I believe most failures are design failures VS user errors and that a better designed system could/should strive to fix them.
So, yes, I could use a Todo list or some other solution to remind myself. But that inherently assumes this rises to the level of neurally important... which trying out a new tool rarely is.
That's why I offered a marketing/growth idea to better help passers-by remember to try it out in a super clean UX way that integrates with their workflow.
I made a colorscheme for vim that uses same color for font and background. Use it sometimes when I need to write long confusing thoughts. It's quite a nice experience, the sentences turn out to be similar to the way I would speak, but still with more thought and deepness.
I am looking for resources on the technical aspects of creative writing. Like this post. Or as mentioned below, on using semantic line breaks https://sembr.org/
I am trying to improve my creative writing style but most what I find on Google is about the creative aspect and not about the technical aspect.
I write one sentence per line as well, but use line wrapping to make it more readable during writing. Reading long sentences on a single line is unpleasant imho.
I‘ll try switching from line wrap to full display to get a better picture of the overall structure.
If the structure is easy to recognize I would probably prefer a simple model that tells me a good line length for the current line I‘m in, e.g. a simple writing plugin for the editor of choice.
Reading this makes me think it might be generally beneficial to finally convey the semantics of sentence boundaries to the resulting output as well, like some `<p><span>Sentence #1.</span> <span>Sentence #2.</span>` wrappers: it would introduce possibility (for author or user) to break it into lines again or apply any other styling, and might improve interaction (think: select single sentence), or some further processing or contextual styling (think "make all single-sentence paragraphs stand out".)
Strange there is no truly "semantic" way to mark-up sub-paragraph chunk of text in HTML; all 'inline' tags are intended for "words" or for including several sentences at once (like emphasis, quote, code, sample, mark, etc.). I have some murky memory I've read some discussion explaining that the concept of "sentence" is quite problematic and in no way universal, but cannot dig it up now.
(This comment started as But how are we supposed to sneak our beloved double spaces between sentences in the output now? semi-pun, but after all, this post-processing idea answers it.)
I completely agree.
Using one line per sentence (and soemtime more lines when the sentence is longer)
makes it way easier to structure the text.
Markdown and are perfectly able to fit the text to the device you are reading on.
It also makes version control and diffs more usable.
However, I can also agree that this style might be not suitable for non-technical writing.
Months ago I noticed that I was doing this because of a (bad?) coding habit. It meant that my writing was recognizable across multiple reddit and discussion board accounts I don't want to be associated with each other. I stopped Writing One Sentence per Line after that.
When I write for myself, it's all over the place. Mostly it's short phrases, unordered lists and the odd diagram, followed by lines of --- to separate thought arenas. All of these are fragments of ideas that I feel will probably be important to the finished piece. Usually about half of them actually are.
I just continue writing down thoughts as they occur, any time they happen during the day or during periods of concentration on the piece itself. If the current thought is not an extension of the last thing I wrote, I make a new line and start the new thought.
Here's a small section of draft notes for a technical article that I never published:
Streaming only for top level args, not deeply nested.... ?
- With set of files, need lots of streams of data.
-- How to get metadata when ordering not guaranteed?
------------------------------------
Is there a way to evaluate, send data from smallest piece to biggest piece?
- Walk the tree, assign weights to branches?
If a hierarchy contains multiple big data pieces, how to tell the receiving function?
Some method to pump in top level args X items at a time?
- 1 item at a time for non-array, x bytes at a time for array
-----------------------------------
Every so often I'll draw another line and summarize everything in a way that succinctly discusses what I'm writing about in note form. Then I draw another line and start writing notes again.
Eventually, the summary notes start to feel solid in my mind, at which point I turn them into prose and then start embedding my notes between the paragraphs, turning them into sentences only once I feel I know where they should go in the overall piece. Once the notes finally disappear from the prose, I have my first draft.
Slightly off topic, but a pet peeve of mine is how you don't get a real line break in markdown when you insert a newline. Sometime I want a line break without a vertical apace for a new paragraph, I can't be the only one here!
I know I can normally just add a br tag, but that looks nasty when you read it as plain text.
That depends on the markdown implementation (like so many features). But most of them implement "two trailing spaces on previous line force line-break" so you can (in most places) do something like this:
This is a paragraph with no linebreaks.
This is a paragraph with
one linebreak but without trailing spaces
This is a paragraph with one
line break and trailing spaces on previous line
That will render correctly on GitHub and other places (meaning, when rendered, the first one has no line-breaks, the second one has no line-breaks but the third one does [select the full third example to see the trailing spaces])
The two spaces-is-linebreak thing is in the commonmark specification, and has been a Markdown feature from the first Gruber Perl script, so it should be pretty compatible.
The problem with it is that it's so "invisible" and that some editors/people have things setup to strip trailing whitespace by default.
I wish there was a simpler way, like "@ at the end of a line indicates a hard line break", but at well.
306 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadhttps://sembr.org/
Uh oh, that’s incompatible with standard em dash usage, which is with no surrounding whitespace.
(I’m designing a lightweight markup language of my own, and it’s tempting to special-case an em dash at the end of a line that is not preceded by a space, to join to the next line without inserting a space, but I’ve been trying to avoid nuance in rules. But I definitely do want to put line breaks after em dashes sometimes.)
Though I prefer the spaced en dash myself, and I am in the UK, I think there's probably a lot of variation on both sides of the Atlantic.
-->like this. I'm okay with that because there are some edge cases [1] in CommonMark that I absolutely need to use one anyway.
[1] https://talk.commonmark.org/t/foo-works-but-foo-fails/2528
But in that case I would prefer that the source text still has no spaces. Such things can be added in postprocessing.
> 3. A semantic line break SHOULD NOT alter the intended meaning of the text.
That should be #1 MUST NOT
Adding a semantic line break inherently changes the relationship between words, and we can't always be sure about the intended meaning of text. If this were MUST NOT, then any modification would risk violating the spec.
Then again, this may be my own, idiosyncratic reading of RFC 2119. If you'd like to discuss this further, feel free to open an issue on the GitHub repo here: https://github.com/sembr/specification/issues
I did the same thing for some time for papers at university for the same reason. It used to annoy me, because I hate to change for my tools, I rather have my tools support my workflow: There should be a nicer diff for that.
0. https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Hooks
https://practicaltypography.com/one-space-between-sentences....
You wouldn't publish anything with line breaks between sentences either. Double spacing or line breaks both work nicely for semantic purposes because html (or markdown which almost always ends up displayed somewhere as html) will ignore it.
Any print publishing software in the 21st century should be aware that two spaces in a prose text source is a hint for a sentence break, and treat it appropriately. They often apply custom spacing (slightly more than 1, but nowhere close to 2) between sentences anyway. Without the two spaces, they have to algorithmically guess at sentences. You just won't notice when there are sentence detection errors, unless you're a typography fanatic; who's going to notice 1 space instead of 1.2 or whatever the optimum happens to be?
What extra information is encoded by fullstop + 2 spaces?
> Good typography seems to dictate a wider space after a sentence than between words.
You:
> Rendering engines can do anything they want. The question is about source representation only, for semantic purposes.
The thread you’ve commented on is literally about rendering, not source representation and semantics. I agree that you can use a double-space as a sentence delimiter, but we’re currently discussing whether it’s “good typography” to render it that way.
I don't think there's much dispute that two spaces is too much in modern properly rendered prose, so I don't know who "we" is. (And anyone who does think two word spaces is just fine, would probably also agree that it should be configurable and not dependent on two spaces in the source text.)
If there's a text renderer out there that renders two spaces as two word spaces in prose, that should be patched, not writers' brains.
Studies examining whether or not wider spacing between sentences improved readability have been inconclusive.
There is one good reason to use two spaces between sentences, at least for text that's going to be processed automatically. It can be very difficult for software to know whether a given punctuation mark is the end of a sentence or something else, like an abbreviation. GNU Emacs, for example, is (or was) coded to recognize sentences by looking for two spaces after a ., ?, or !.[1]
1 https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Se...
I couldn't tell you when I switched.
I continued through university while using a computer to type things up, I'm pretty sure my thesis had double spaces after periods, written in WP. Once I graduated I dropped it pretty quickly.
Was there an early version of Word's spell-check-on-the-fly that underlined double spaces, or am I miss-remembering?
I don't remember that and I was a fairly early user of Word going back to DOS days although I rarely use it any longer.
It has not been the norm for German ever.
Edit: Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22975299
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all different. You are in a little maze of twisty passages, all different. You are in a little maze of twisting passages, all different.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all different. You are in a[-little-] maze of twisty {+little+} passages, all different. You are in a[-little-] maze of [-twisting-]{+twisty little+} passages, all different.
You are in a {+little+} maze of twisty[-little-] passages, all different. You are in a little maze of twisty passages, all different. You are in a little maze of [-twisting-]{+twisty+} passages, all different.
You are in a {+little+} maze of [-twisty little-]{+twisting+} passages, all different. You are in a little maze of [-twisty-]{+twisting+} passages, all different. You are in a little maze of twisting passages, all different.
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?
As the above implies, you don't have great version control and some of the process management is manual. But it works well for people accustomed to working that way and it's much more familiar for people who don't regularly use git (or use it at all).
EDIT: Meaning that I think this kind of justification is more interesting since it is meant to affect the process of writing itself.
They used to translate my emails, "in-place," so this allowed the translators to insert a line of Kanji characters, below each of my lines.
It also taught me to be frugal in my content, but you'd never know it, reading my stuff, these days...
Write the exact same paragraph, one with an EOL between each sentence, one without.
Natives always understood the paragraph with EOL. Personally I didn't see any difference but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think it's true all the time, but it shows a lot more when you speak in a language where the grammar is super different from what you're used too.
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. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.
So I write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. Don’t just write words. Write music.
(Gary Provost)
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 published product.
with line breaks after grammatical units.
I've noticed that since I started doing so,
I've been writing longer paragraphs and sentences,
since the line breaks in the source do for me
what paragraph and sentence breaks do for the reader.
It's something I have to pay attention to.
Though if you wanted to get fancy you could use other vim movement commands (yank the next 2 sentences), I still think it's easier using lines.
EDIT: I just want to point that differently from this thread, the article is not about text style.
For technical writing, "no more than one thought per sentence" works quite well in my opinion. Or at least it's a good guideline to apply in the first pass of proofreading.
I guess what I'm trying to get across is not a single thought but a perspective which requires some background and context to appreciate, and I struggle with separating out the essential from the incidental, and structuring it for maximum engagement.
It is such a simple technique, that makes such a huge impact on ones writing, and yet no teacher bothered to teach it. I spent all my school years writing monotonous essays of five-word sentences. Week after week I would make another one, and I could clearly see for myself that they were bad, I just couldn't tell why. So when I asked my teachers for help, asking "what is wrong with my writing?", "what am I missing?", all I ever got back was a bad grade and the same useless tip: "just read more".
They might just as well have said to "draw the rest of the fucking owl."
There is generally no "hack" that the student can use to avoid having to read a lot of stuff, in order to learn and especially to become an expert. What a student needs to read, isn't necessarily textbooks or the traditional orthodoxy of materials, but still there is undoubtedly a lot of reading that must be done, to "get good" as they say.
That being said, for a teacher to GUIDE that reading, to give some hints, pointers, themes, interconnections, sequencing (start with X, then read Y to deepen your knowledge of X), etc., is absolutely invaluable.
To me, this seems like the Pareto-optimal 80/20 breakdown, where 20% of the teacher's investment in time and energy can get you 80% of the benefit of having teaching at all (i.e. don't need a full curriculum or full-time commitment to dedicated instruction, but do need to spend some time/energy pointing the student in various directions and giving them some ideas to think about while reading).
It’s useless advice to a student asking for specific help. A cooking student asking “why is my rice always soggy” should hear “let’s start by examining how much water you’re using”, not “watch more cooking shows until you understand through osmosis”.
The point of a teacher is to teach. If the only guidance they can muster is “consume more of what you’re trying to create”, there’s no point to having a class.
I've seen a lot of baseball and golf, and I still don't know how to even try to swing those things properly.
Reading more would be reading problems. Doing practice problems is equivalent to writing and having someone/something point out if it's good or not.
Many if not most modern writing advice will remind you to focus on your audience. Most audiences aren't composed of eight year olds. So it isn't true that most advice suggests writing for eight year olds.
> As a result, the level of reading and comprehension for most people has decreased to a level that is lower than in any other literate society.
We track statistics like reading comprehension and you can look them up. I did. The source I found showed that every state in the US I checked - with the exception of Michigan (??) - has reading comprehension improve relative to the year 2003. In some cases this improvement is by a notable amount, in some cases not so notable.
It seems unlikely to me that people now are worse at reading and writing than people used to be. Writing is more common now and reading is more common too. Once, journalists wrote. Now everyone does.
That may be true although I can tell you from personal experience that writing optimizers for places like trade press sites absolutely push you towards more basic language, shorter sentences, etc. One site in particular I used to write for sometimes told me every single time that I should basically dumb down my prose. And I don't write in a particularly literary way and I've pretty much never had this feedback from human editors.
>Once, journalists wrote. Now everyone does.
Interesting observation. At one point, most business people above a certain level were "writing" by dictating to their secretaries which is a completely different mode of getting information onto a page.
It does exist. It can be as harmful as you think it is. Yet it isn't harmful everywhere - isn't the world at large without any variation. It is intimately tied to the environment you are in, because that environment produces the rewards. Different environment, different reward, different impact on your writing. The effect is local, not global.
Which means you get to have a superpower.
When you have a bad transformation that degrades thinking that makes the term "medium is the message" feel dangerous. So you get things like Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. I think your post is an example of the same type of fear. This focus - on the examples of times where things are negative - it misses the opportunity. Since messages are a function not of raw ideas, but of their audiences you have an incredible power. Choose the right audience. Set the expectation for evaluation in advance. Pick the medium that helps you to think clearly and makes it easy to be judged. Now, instead of being destroyed by your incentive environment, you get empowered by it.
Take a look at Amazon's writing culture for an example of that. Or more broadly, the many companies which chose to ban powerpoint for reasons which are fundamentally related to what I'm talking about. We're not worse at understanding writing than ever before. We're more advanced than ever before, because we stand atop the giants that came before us. Yet at the same time - we're not, because that too is local and not global. The future is often already here, but isn't evenly distributed.
Would it be possible for you share an example of your prose that received this criticism?
https://www.techtarget.com/contributor/Gordon-Haff
And that's probably after I made a few token changes to make the plug-in happier.
As in: practice makes perfect. Observing a master, will make you a master.
But unless your eye or brain can detect what they're doing, it can feel hopeless.
Sometimes having it broken out like this really helps. I found this amazing too!
So really, perfect practice makes perfect. Or at least saves time and avoids forming bad habits along the way.
I thought it was a useful point because I write with one line per sentence, but had only considered the first advantage.
Quotes: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/50666270-days-without-...
The criminally unknown Janni Howker borders on poetry in her prose. Try Martin Farrell.
A professor at college tried to hone into us the short-precise nature of English as a cultural phenomenon and considered the paragraph long highly artistic German texts a reflection of a culture that felt the need to impress.
Still to this day, I admire both: the sophisticated elaborate construction of long flowery sentences that strain your memory as well as the ultra-concise that brilliantly clear short (often technical) prose.
What is this obsession with writing not being boring? If you're reading the passphrase to disarm a nuclear missile do you think you might get bored halfway if the sentences are too long?
I never understood why people insist on having short sentences. Human thought does not come in a small pre-packaged short sentence form. Some of the best philosophers wrote very long sentences, look at Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant. Let's not dumb ourselves down by sacrificing rich, deep thoughts just because our ADHD might kick in and we might get distracted by the next YouTube cat video.
This may come as a surprise, but sometimes a piece of writing is not technical documentation.
> But several together become monotonous.
I was delighted when I first read the short, punchy, and somewhat dislocated clauses of The Stranger by Camus. Actually, a more pertinent example is the first page or so of Molloy by Samuel Beckett. Maybe the reader is supposed to be bored; I find it refreshing.
Though I suspect that the motivation is different.
I don't think that's the word you're looking for =)
(Since we're on the topic of words in this thread.)
Either way, though, for sentence source formatting, sentences on line boundaries also help version control systems since a diff shows the delta on a per sentence basis. Note that this is slightly different than one per line - it is more integer number of lines per sentence since some are multi-line. Same ethos, though.
So, I've build myself an app to make that easier. Essentially, it's just a more stupid version of a text box. It's free, it's private, and it's meant to put you in the state of flow.
I've been using it every day for the past 3 years or so and I know that some people find it useful too, but even if I was the only user, I'd still be quite happy with it, since I suck at sticking with habits :)
Check it out!
https://enso.sonnet.io
https://first-draft.netlify.app
I think there's still potential in writing tools with decent UX (iA Writer and such) and I know that some people wanted to pay me for Enso, so I'm trying to figure out the best course of action: either charge premium for a premium native app or let the people chip in. Paid products tend to get more valuable feedback.
You've (re)discovered the old adage: write drunk, edit sober.
https://sonnet.io/posts/code-sober-debug-drunk/
"[...] to say istead of how you want to say it."
Instead is missing a "n". :)
https://write.sonnet.io/
Content: i’m currently on my mobile phone and I absolutely adore the idea of Enso (funny enough I’m currently holding & feeding my infant named Enzo). I would like to write with it and try it when I don’t have an infant on my lap but that requires me remembering it and looking it up when back on my laptop and ready to write something.
I added my email on the mobile sign-up but frankly I don’t really want a mobile app as 60% of my long-form mobile writing is done via voice to text and edited later. What I’d like is a “remind me via email to give Enso a try” signup that says “hey, this is a reminder to try Enso… The flow focused, low editing app for creative writing” or something like that.
I like this. Thanks! Email notifications nowadays are a bit of a pain to set up, since they need to contain the physical address of the sender in the footer, so this is a piece of work I _always_ keep postponing. I was even considering dropping that form completely. Maybe I could generate a calendar event with a reminder instead? This way I won't have to store any data about the user and I could probably piggy back on the phone UX when it comes to reminders. Just thinking aloud here.
> as 60% of my long-form mobile writing is done via voice to text and edited later.
Yeah, your description matches my own usage patterns. And, I've reached a similar conclusion. Mobile-first Ensō would probably have two modes: keyboard + dictation.
The sequenced auto responders that they have boost my open and click rates as much as 300% and allow for some truly powerful/complex programmatic features that anyone who's on HN would love.
Cheers, will give it a shot! (or just get the damn PO Box)
You could also just send yourself an email, you know.
Or, if you're fancy, use a to-do list that you can access both on your mobile and your computer.
(To be fair, I recall the brain-fog that comes with having an infant.)
So, yes, I could use a Todo list or some other solution to remind myself. But that inherently assumes this rises to the level of neurally important... which trying out a new tool rarely is.
That's why I offered a marketing/growth idea to better help passers-by remember to try it out in a super clean UX way that integrates with their workflow.
It's more like "One sentence per page(s) — https://nathanbrixius.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/the-five-long...
And this is on line 4.
I am looking for resources on the technical aspects of creative writing. Like this post. Or as mentioned below, on using semantic line breaks https://sembr.org/
I am trying to improve my creative writing style but most what I find on Google is about the creative aspect and not about the technical aspect.
I‘ll try switching from line wrap to full display to get a better picture of the overall structure.
If the structure is easy to recognize I would probably prefer a simple model that tells me a good line length for the current line I‘m in, e.g. a simple writing plugin for the editor of choice.
Strange there is no truly "semantic" way to mark-up sub-paragraph chunk of text in HTML; all 'inline' tags are intended for "words" or for including several sentences at once (like emphasis, quote, code, sample, mark, etc.). I have some murky memory I've read some discussion explaining that the concept of "sentence" is quite problematic and in no way universal, but cannot dig it up now.
(This comment started as But how are we supposed to sneak our beloved double spaces between sentences in the output now? semi-pun, but after all, this post-processing idea answers it.)
However, I can also agree that this style might be not suitable for non-technical writing.
There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I just continue writing down thoughts as they occur, any time they happen during the day or during periods of concentration on the piece itself. If the current thought is not an extension of the last thing I wrote, I make a new line and start the new thought.
Here's a small section of draft notes for a technical article that I never published:
Every so often I'll draw another line and summarize everything in a way that succinctly discusses what I'm writing about in note form. Then I draw another line and start writing notes again.Eventually, the summary notes start to feel solid in my mind, at which point I turn them into prose and then start embedding my notes between the paragraphs, turning them into sentences only once I feel I know where they should go in the overall piece. Once the notes finally disappear from the prose, I have my first draft.
Edit: Oh come now... Editing your post to also say what I replied, then voting me down is poor sportsmanship old chap.
Here is a demo of it in action: https://jbt.github.io/markdown-editor/#dY3RCYAwDET/M8VN4DQuE...
The problem with it is that it's so "invisible" and that some editors/people have things setup to strip trailing whitespace by default.
I wish there was a simpler way, like "@ at the end of a line indicates a hard line break", but at well.