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I completely agree. As another native English speaker I find the highlighted passage parses incredibly naturally. It feels like a single cohesive thought witho
by Normal_gaussian 10y ago
I completely agree. As another native English speaker I find the highlighted passage parses incredibly naturally. It feels like a single cohesive thought without the need for back-referencing despite encompassing several 'ideas'.
- CamelCaseName 10y agoIt's also important to note the difference in how text is consumed online vs in a book. I am a native English speaker and I was confused on the first pass when reading quickly and ignoring punctuation. Reading slower and taking pauses at the commas allowed me to understand. I think that minimizing the use of negatives and pauses helps the reader absorb the information quickly.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoIt's slightly stylised 19th century English, which is very different to 21st century English. We don't use run-on sentences peppered by parenthetical clauses nearly as much as we used to, so I'm not surprised some readers may find it dense. For more modern English, I think George Orwell is very hard to beat. For blog posts, Paul Graham is always worth reading - not so much for the content, which is often debatable, but for the style, which is reliably lucid. But it's always a good idea to match the social register and jargon level of the target audience. Professional writers often work on a range of gigs and know how to mould English into a range of styles and voices to reach different audiences. So I'd be skeptical of any suggestion there's a One True Style for online content or technical writing. There are certainly common standards and traditions, but they may be out of date or too company-specific to apply generally.