8 ms·

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 w

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. (Gary Provost)

pagutierrezn 4y ago
"We need to vary the lengths of our sentences. Sometimes short. Sometimes long."
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  The comment was a "yes, and" not a "no, but"
  - eesmith 4y ago
    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 https://sive.rs/book/WritingTools - which includes that Gary Provost "tour de force".
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jstummbillig 4y ago
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 published product.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pgcj_poster 4y ago
  I tend to write prose source code 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.
  - kadoban 4y ago
    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.
- SamBam 4y ago
  GP was echoing the article's point that writing one sentence per line lets you notice, and vary, your line lengths.
  - jstummbillig 4y ago
    Ah. If that's the case (and I can see how it might be) I misunderstood. Thanks.
xwowsersx 4y ago
My favorite excerpt from that book!
gnulinux 4y ago
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)
- wongarsu 4y ago
  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.
  - andai 4y ago
    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.
    - cseleborg 4y ago
      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.
      - andai 4y ago
        "Forgive me this long letter—I had not the time to make it short."
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  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.
SkeuomorphicBee 4y ago
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."
- t-3 4y ago
  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...
  - awestroke 4y ago
    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?
    - strgcmc 4y ago
      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).
exysle 4y ago
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.
- rsfern 4y ago
  The authors second point is that the length of each sentence also stands out. This helps you assess the flow of the writing. I thought it was a useful point because I write with one line per sentence, but had only considered the first advantage.
eddd-ddde 4y ago
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.
- OneLessThing 4y ago
  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.
- andruc 4y ago
  I wouldn't recommend consuming art like we do documentation.
jalino23 4y ago
Where can I read more of this kind of musicly writing? It was so satisfying to read! I truly enjoyed it like no other reading I’ve experience before
- keithalewis 4y ago
  I can highly recommend "The Heavenly City of the 18-th Century Philosophers" by Carl Becker.
- auxbuss 4y ago
  Sebastian Barry is a master. Try Days Without End. Quotes: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/50666270-days-without-end https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/50666270-days-without-... The criminally unknown Janni Howker borders on poetry in her prose. Try Martin Farrell.
novalis78 4y ago
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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
soheil 4y ago
> The writing is getting boring. 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.
- fknorangesite 4y ago
  > What is this obsession with writing not being boring? This may come as a surprise, but sometimes a piece of writing is not technical documentation.
HKH2 4y ago
Five word sentences are fine. The first paragraph is not; the content itself is dull. Do it with useful sentences.
- fknorangesite 4y ago
  Of course. Hence > But several together become monotonous.
- joedavison 4y ago
  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.
  - HKH2 4y ago
    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.
    - fknorangesite 4y ago
      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.
      - HKH2 4y ago
        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.
paulpauper 4y ago
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.

pagutierrezn 4y ago

"We need to vary the lengths of our sentences. Sometimes short. Sometimes long."

Ensorceled 4y ago
The comment was a "yes, and" not a "no, but"
- eesmith 4y ago
  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 https://sive.rs/book/WritingTools - which includes that Gary Provost "tour de force".

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jstummbillig 4y ago

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 published product.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pgcj_poster 4y ago
I tend to write prose source code 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.
- kadoban 4y ago
  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.
SamBam 4y ago
GP was echoing the article's point that writing one sentence per line lets you notice, and vary, your line lengths.
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  Ah. If that's the case (and I can see how it might be) I misunderstood. Thanks.

xwowsersx 4y ago

My favorite excerpt from that book!

gnulinux 4y ago

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)

wongarsu 4y ago
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.
- andai 4y ago
  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.
  - cseleborg 4y ago
    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.
    - andai 4y ago
      "Forgive me this long letter—I had not the time to make it short."
marcosdumay 4y ago
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.

SkeuomorphicBee 4y ago

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."

t-3 4y ago
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...
- awestroke 4y ago
  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?
  - strgcmc 4y ago
    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).

exysle 4y ago

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.

rsfern 4y ago
The authors second point is that the length of each sentence also stands out. This helps you assess the flow of the writing. I thought it was a useful point because I write with one line per sentence, but had only considered the first advantage.

eddd-ddde 4y ago

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.

OneLessThing 4y ago
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.
andruc 4y ago
I wouldn't recommend consuming art like we do documentation.

jalino23 4y ago

Where can I read more of this kind of musicly writing? It was so satisfying to read! I truly enjoyed it like no other reading I’ve experience before

keithalewis 4y ago
I can highly recommend "The Heavenly City of the 18-th Century Philosophers" by Carl Becker.
auxbuss 4y ago
Sebastian Barry is a master. Try Days Without End. Quotes: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/50666270-days-without-end https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/50666270-days-without-... The criminally unknown Janni Howker borders on poetry in her prose. Try Martin Farrell.

novalis78 4y ago

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.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

soheil 4y ago

> The writing is getting boring. 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.

fknorangesite 4y ago
> What is this obsession with writing not being boring? This may come as a surprise, but sometimes a piece of writing is not technical documentation.

HKH2 4y ago

Five word sentences are fine. The first paragraph is not; the content itself is dull. Do it with useful sentences.

fknorangesite 4y ago
Of course. Hence > But several together become monotonous.
joedavison 4y ago
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.
- HKH2 4y ago
  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.
  - fknorangesite 4y ago
    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.
    - HKH2 4y ago
      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.

paulpauper 4y ago

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.