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> My Spanish-speaking students must be given the bad news that those long sentences will have to be cruelly chopped up into short sentences with short nouns and
by catnaroek 9y ago
> My Spanish-speaking students must be given the bad news that those long sentences will have to be cruelly chopped up into short sentences with short nouns and short active verbs that drive the story forward. What’s considered “good writing” in Spanish is not “good writing” in English.
As a native Spanish speaker, I disagree: Unnecessarily long sentences are considered just as bad in Spanish as they are in English. The average Spanish sentence is a little longer than the average English sentence, but that's only because the average Spanish word is a little longer than the average English word.
- mal184 9y agoI have no knowledge of Spanish, but I think your comment is spot on. I think the author of this article is wrong that things like simplicity, well-placed verbs, and economy are unique to English. The students from other language cultures who claim otherwise likely have a very distorted view of their own language. Good verbs are like a universal principle of good language, as is the one thought per sentence rule. These rules might need to be tweaked - perhaps, for example, simple clauses can be strung together into a single sentence as dependent and independent clauses more easily in one particular language, but the universal part is then the simple clause with a good verb. These universal principles of good writing are like the foundation of the house - they have to be in place - , and everything else, like nice adjectives, proverbs, etc. are ornamental. The author's students are confusing the ornaments of their languages for the foundation.