4 ms·

The author seems to be deliberately trying to manufacture long sentences to make his point, mainly by taking two related sentences and pushing them together wit

The author seems to be deliberately trying to manufacture long sentences to make his point, mainly by taking two related sentences and pushing them together with a semicolon. It serves no purpose in improving comprehension and comes at the cost of making parsing more difficult. It feels rather like the sort of hypercorrection [1] that people sometimes make when they're trying to sound erudite. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection

idlewords 11y ago
Another thing people do when they're trying to sound erudite is ostentatiously [1] link definitions to concepts they think their readers can't look up for themselves. 1. Don't do that
- copsarebastards 11y ago
  Just because I can look it up for myself doesn't mean I don't appreciate having a link, especially if the writer went to the effort of choosing a link that's better than the first Google search result. 1. Since apparently we’re overthinking things, have you considered that your oversensitivity to minor perceived offenses is because you’ve never been punched?
adwf 11y ago
My thought exactly: "Someone's found the semicolon key" Most of those semicolons could be replaced with a full stop or comma without losing any meaning.
- cfmcdonald 11y ago
  John Donne, bad writer? "If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
  - angli 11y ago
    A 17th century writer. More importantly, a poet. Not sure how I feel about the point of the article, but this sheds no light on it - Donne's work is pretty different from modern prose. Different best practices apply.
westoncb 11y ago
Actually, it does serve a purpose: it allows you to accurately mark a syntactic hierarchy, indicating clause separation, as distinct from phrase separation. This is especially important when you have two complementary clauses whose relationship should be highlighted, as in the author's "So if you find yourself breaking sentences apart to follow a rule that sentences should be short, you’re doing it wrong; if they can be broken apart without much trouble, they also weren’t any trouble for the reader to understand in the first place." Sure, he could make them two separate sentences—but why waste the opportunity to signal their relatedness? Separating the two with a period represents them as equally related to other surrounding sentences. We can decode their connection still, but signaling it explicitly just makes it smoother. I found his writing to be extremely clear, easy to follow, and enjoyable to read.
- RyanMcGreal 11y ago
  Here's the thing: two sentences right next to each other within the same paragraph are related. The sentence is merely one tier in the hierarchy of organizational structures that frame writing. The paragraph also forms a unit of structure in which one or more related sentences collectively convey an idea. I'm not suggesting there is no use for a semicolon - for example, I like to use it as a separator for a list of clauses if one or more of the clauses contain commas - and of course this is one of those grey areas of English grammar in which the author's use is not objectively wrong. However, it overloads the sentence and makes reading more difficult without any real benefit over the simpler alternative of connecting related sentences in paragraphs. Likewise, I'm not opposed to writing long sentences. After all, the first sentence in the previous paragraph runs 56 words. However, I am opposed to writing long sentences merely for the sake of claiming that long sentences are okay.

idlewords 11y ago

Another thing people do when they're trying to sound erudite is ostentatiously [1] link definitions to concepts they think their readers can't look up for themselves. 1. Don't do that

copsarebastards 11y ago
Just because I can look it up for myself doesn't mean I don't appreciate having a link, especially if the writer went to the effort of choosing a link that's better than the first Google search result. 1. Since apparently we’re overthinking things, have you considered that your oversensitivity to minor perceived offenses is because you’ve never been punched?

adwf 11y ago

My thought exactly: "Someone's found the semicolon key" Most of those semicolons could be replaced with a full stop or comma without losing any meaning.

cfmcdonald 11y ago
John Donne, bad writer? "If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
- angli 11y ago
  A 17th century writer. More importantly, a poet. Not sure how I feel about the point of the article, but this sheds no light on it - Donne's work is pretty different from modern prose. Different best practices apply.

westoncb 11y ago

Actually, it does serve a purpose: it allows you to accurately mark a syntactic hierarchy, indicating clause separation, as distinct from phrase separation. This is especially important when you have two complementary clauses whose relationship should be highlighted, as in the author's "So if you find yourself breaking sentences apart to follow a rule that sentences should be short, you’re doing it wrong; if they can be broken apart without much trouble, they also weren’t any trouble for the reader to understand in the first place." Sure, he could make them two separate sentences—but why waste the opportunity to signal their relatedness? Separating the two with a period represents them as equally related to other surrounding sentences. We can decode their connection still, but signaling it explicitly just makes it smoother. I found his writing to be extremely clear, easy to follow, and enjoyable to read.

RyanMcGreal 11y ago
Here's the thing: two sentences right next to each other within the same paragraph are related. The sentence is merely one tier in the hierarchy of organizational structures that frame writing. The paragraph also forms a unit of structure in which one or more related sentences collectively convey an idea. I'm not suggesting there is no use for a semicolon - for example, I like to use it as a separator for a list of clauses if one or more of the clauses contain commas - and of course this is one of those grey areas of English grammar in which the author's use is not objectively wrong. However, it overloads the sentence and makes reading more difficult without any real benefit over the simpler alternative of connecting related sentences in paragraphs. Likewise, I'm not opposed to writing long sentences. After all, the first sentence in the previous paragraph runs 56 words. However, I am opposed to writing long sentences merely for the sake of claiming that long sentences are okay.