Hacker News Reader

Comment by prof-dr-ir | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who thinks that sinlge-sentence paragraphs should be the exception, not the rule?

You are not the only one. It's irritating to read. Complexity and nuance are sacrificed because the writer values concision over truthfulness.

You can see the problem in the first two sentences of the article:

"To write well is to think clearly.

If you can think clearly, you can find something worth saying."

These are pleasant aphoristic paragragraphs, but what they say is not actually true. They gesture towards something true, but the drive to simplicity has turned potentially interesting points into falsehoods.

And the next sentence is both false and damaging. Good writing is most definitely not "therapy that you publish for the world to learn from".

(Plus, the writer should give balanced sentences a rest. They're useful to have in the rhetorical toolbox, but quickly become tedious when overused.)

I tried reading some of the later articles in the series, and they're exhausting! All the writing has this incredibly tiring staccato rhythm, and the articles are just gigantic dumps of bullet points and headers. It's like having being machine-gunned with marketing platitudes and writing truisms.

There's another problem with being obsessed with concision: it's more compatible with simple ideas than nuanced ideas. I work at a place where I'm required to explain urban planning issues while using the simplest-possible subjects in all sentences. So, I can write, "Transit improves traffic," but I can't write, "To the extent that transit enables residents to reach destinations more efficiently than driving, a greater number of proportion of people can travel without worsening traffic." This isn't a great example because I'm sure there's a simpler way to write my second sentence. The pattern I've noticed, however, is that I often need to be intellectually dishonest to write simple sentences with simple subjects, because they make the world seem simpler than it is. A complex world — full of gradations and marginal costs — often requires complex sentences.

I find the same when I write about technical topics for a non-technical audience. I write sentences that aren't quite true, because the truth is more complex than the reader cares about or would understand without additional background.

I've learned to live with it, because the alternatives are to i) write a book instead of a memo or article or ii) weigh sentences down with hedges, caveats, and qualifications that don't help the reader anyway.

My take:

<subheading>Transit improves traffic</subheading>

When many people travel on the road as a unit - in a bus for example - traffic flow improves compared to everyone driving their own car and thus travelling as separate units of traffic. Most of the bad stuff we dislike about traffic results from "friction" and interaction: yielding at intersections, the gaps between vehicles following each other, being slow to react on green light, and so on. But traffic won't automatically improve with more transit. It needs to be planned such that ...

---

In your long version (which you admit can be improved) I dislike the fancy, prestige words of "residents", "destination", "greater number or proportion of people" can just be "more people". I find that good, world-renowned experts are not afraid to write in simple words but still give deep insights into special topics. I find that the less pretentious and shorter the words are in an academic paper, the more likely it is to come from a top research group or top researcher.

It's super trendy right now.

Especially on LinkedIn.

These single sentence paragraphs.

Provocative.

At least that's what they think they are.

I find them annoying.

Trite.

Overdone.

In all seriousness: this article reads more like an outline than an actual piece of writing. Good writing is all about pacing. Some of your sentences should be long and winding. While others are short.

That variance in rhythm keeps your reader involved in the piece. It's not necessary to convey a point-information is just as easily digested in bullet-point form-but it's necessary if you want to maintain your audience's attention over time.

Broetry: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/why-are-these-p...

When I worked for a Japanese company, this became the norm. It made translations a lot easier.

I still believe in short paragraphs; though not necessarily single-sentence ones. Paragraphs are meant to collect ideas, and it’s often a good practice to have a fairly “granular” approach, with “atomic,” self-contained “modules.”

The idea is to allow reading to proceed in a “piecemeal” fashion. This is due to the way people consume prose, these days, with sidebars and interruptions. It also lends itself well to reference reading.

In any case, a “wall of text” approach is disastrous in digital media. It works well, for justified paperbacks, but not so well on a digital device.

> In any case, a “wall of text” approach is disastrous in digital media.

I hear this a lot, but it seems to me true only in a limited context. "Walls of text" are disastrous in marketing and some technical content, but these should not be the standard to which all writers aspire, even if they publish exclusively online.

For example, the London Review of Books[0] is famed for its long paragraphs, but they suit the topics and discursive, nuanced argument. Chopping them into smaller chunks would not make the arguments easier to follow for the educated readers who subscribe to the LRB.

[0]: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n23/james-butler/failed-...

That’s not a “wall of text.” The typography, layout and paragraphs are done in a fashion that makes them quite readable in digital format.

Note that the paragraphs are not indented, space-separated, and the text is left-justified.

The use of a serif font is somewhat unusual for a digital medium, but it’s a very crisp, “light” font, presented with maximum contrast, on a pure white background.

That is a concession to digital media.

Also, the writing is excellent, which helps a lot.

Ah, perhaps I misunderstood. You said "I still believe in short paragraphs," which I did not understand to mean "I believe in excellent typography".

They are not mutually exclusive. I think that I could have phrased the "wall of text" comment a bit better.

Basically, I think we've all encountered sites that have huge blocks of text that could be broken into discrete sections (AKA "paragraphs").

Paragraphing is a bit of an "artform." All of the rules are heuristics, not "hard and fast." I feel that it helps my prose to be more readable, if I break it up.

One reason is that, even though I am fairly prolific, I am not a "top notch" writer, so I need all the help I can get.

You said the magic word: "Subscribers", i.e. people who are paying for content. LRB's reputation and audience is such that it does not need to obsess about SEO or social shares attracting the widest possible audience to show ads to.

As a result, they can stick to providing long-form writing instead of chasing whatever the new "maximize engagement/conversions" trick is.

Nope! You're definitely not the only one. For a page about writing well, this is a stupendously annoying thing to read.

To cherry pick a "paragraph" from the text:

> Ignore that advice.

If I see an article written this way, I immediately close the window.

That's my reaction as well but it seems to becoming more popular, presumably because people are consuming it.

Tell that to Dave Trott, who is an influential British advertising copywriter. All of his writing comes in the form of one sentence paragraphs. There's whole books of it! https://davetrott.co.uk/

That style is ideal for advertising copy, but for little else. The author of the original article could have avoided a lot of criticism if he’d called it “Writing Marketing Copy Well” instead of “Writing Well”.

It's a pretty specific style for writing on the web, where you assume that users are initially scanning the page rather than focusing on the text. On the web, users have been trained to do this because websites are designed differently from books. Body text segments will be split up by ads, there's a sidebar with popular articles, etc.

In this medium, a long paragraph of text may look less scannable to a reader, especially if they are on a mobile device. Hence the single setence paragraphs.

I don't prefer this style of writing either. I save to Pocket and read offline, so a standard essay-style layout works fine for me.

People don't read on the internet, they only skim. Short sentences are better for that.

You promote short sentences but I asked about single-sentence paragraphs. Maybe you only skimmed my comment?

Oh, I meant that one! My bad, English is a second language for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com