4 ms·
Five word sentences are fine. The first paragraph is not; the content itself is dull. Do it with useful sentences.
by 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 agoOf course. Hence > But several together become monotonous.
- joedavison 4y agoThe 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 agoWhat 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 agoI 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 agoThe 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.