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Jane Austen's "magnificent opening sentence of Persuasion" was 102 words long. I found it confusing. Replacing all the semicolons with periods, made it easy and
by AltVanilla 8y ago
Jane Austen's "magnificent opening sentence of Persuasion" was 102 words long. I found it confusing. Replacing all the semicolons with periods, made it easy and enjoyable reading.
I prefer the minimalist style of Strunk:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style
- ghaff 8y agoThere's a lot wrong with Strunk & White. (For a particularly over the top critique, see http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/LandOfTheFree.pdf http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/LandOfTheFree.pdf ) But modern style definitely tends toward short sentences. With a lot of periods. Even if you create sentence fragments. Sort of Hemingway-esque. Which does tend to deprecate semi-colons. I enjoyed Eats, Shoots and Leaves. But, as a participant in my company's semi-formal writing style group, I found a lot of the examples contrived and overly complex. As in programming, once you get into trying to figure out the official precedence of operators, you've already lost the game. Rework things so the answer is immediately obvious to people who don't remember whether booleans are computed before exponents.
- jimhefferon 8y agoI get a dead link there.
- ghaff 8y agoSomehow ended up being an extra period in there. Works now.