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Comment by Disruptive_Dave | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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."

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...

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?

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).

This is all brushing up against the central theme of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", which approaches its core thesis by dissecting the process of teaching college students how to "write Quality".

Reading as a reader is kinda different than reading as a writer. Different mind states. As a reader I'm getting lost in a story, not picking up on writing styles and patterns. You're not wrong. Just need the caveat of reading with the intention (or partial intention) to pull yourself out of the story and check out the architecture.

> Reading more is the best way to learn though.

It’s useless advice to a student asking for specific help. A cooking student asking “why is my rice always soggy” should hear “let’s start by examining how much water you’re using”, not “watch more cooking shows until you understand through osmosis”.

The point of a teacher is to teach. If the only guidance they can muster is “consume more of what you’re trying to create”, there’s no point to having a class.

Yes, not everyone can notice the important element of what they're witnessing, especially not a novice.

I've seen a lot of baseball and golf, and I still don't know how to even try to swing those things properly.

> When my math teachers told me "just do the practice problems", I also thought they were idiots, but they were actually right...

Reading more would be reading problems. Doing practice problems is equivalent to writing and having someone/something point out if it's good or not.

as they say: those who can't do, teach

That is five words long.

So is that, my friend.

That too! Imagine the chances!

They = idiots

This is a problem with most advice on English writing. They only teach you how to write as at a level that a 8 years old reader would understand. Most modern books, fiction or not, are written at a juvenile level, at the formal request of publishers. As a result, the level of reading and comprehension for most people has decreased to a level that is lower than in any other literate society.

> they only teach you how to write as at a level that a 8 years old reader would understand.

Many if not most modern writing advice will remind you to focus on your audience. Most audiences aren't composed of eight year olds. So it isn't true that most advice suggests writing for eight year olds.

> As a result, the level of reading and comprehension for most people has decreased to a level that is lower than in any other literate society.

We track statistics like reading comprehension and you can look them up. I did. The source I found showed that every state in the US I checked - with the exception of Michigan (??) - has reading comprehension improve relative to the year 2003. In some cases this improvement is by a notable amount, in some cases not so notable.

It seems unlikely to me that people now are worse at reading and writing than people used to be. Writing is more common now and reading is more common too. Once, journalists wrote. Now everyone does.

>So it isn't true that most advice suggests writing for eight year olds.

That may be true although I can tell you from personal experience that writing optimizers for places like trade press sites absolutely push you towards more basic language, shorter sentences, etc. One site in particular I used to write for sometimes told me every single time that I should basically dumb down my prose. And I don't write in a particularly literary way and I've pretty much never had this feedback from human editors.

>Once, journalists wrote. Now everyone does.

Interesting observation. At one point, most business people above a certain level were "writing" by dictating to their secretaries which is a completely different mode of getting information onto a page.

I believe you. Medium is the message is a term from media theory. It refers to the idea that messages aren't in a vacuum, but are shaped by where they are transmitted. Often that shape is a function of what the audience will find appealing. You can tie this sort of thing to bellman equations to get a mathematical grip on the effect.

It does exist. It can be as harmful as you think it is. Yet it isn't harmful everywhere - isn't the world at large without any variation. It is intimately tied to the environment you are in, because that environment produces the rewards. Different environment, different reward, different impact on your writing. The effect is local, not global.

Which means you get to have a superpower.

When you have a bad transformation that degrades thinking that makes the term "medium is the message" feel dangerous. So you get things like Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. I think your post is an example of the same type of fear. This focus - on the examples of times where things are negative - it misses the opportunity. Since messages are a function not of raw ideas, but of their audiences you have an incredible power. Choose the right audience. Set the expectation for evaluation in advance. Pick the medium that helps you to think clearly and makes it easy to be judged. Now, instead of being destroyed by your incentive environment, you get empowered by it.

Take a look at Amazon's writing culture for an example of that. Or more broadly, the many companies which chose to ban powerpoint for reasons which are fundamentally related to what I'm talking about. We're not worse at understanding writing than ever before. We're more advanced than ever before, because we stand atop the giants that came before us. Yet at the same time - we're not, because that too is local and not global. The future is often already here, but isn't evenly distributed.

I think you’re both making good points in this thread. I’m writing a non-fiction book in my spare time, and I’ve had to face the fact that my default get-words-on-the-page is extremely flowery.

Would it be possible for you share an example of your prose that received this criticism?

Basically anything here had the Wordpress plug-in whining:

https://www.techtarget.com/contributor/Gordon-Haff

And that's probably after I made a few token changes to make the plug-in happier.

Very interesting, thanks for sharing.

I’m curious, what language/country was that?

Some people are going to respond "reading more is the right thing to do".

As in: practice makes perfect. Observing a master, will make you a master.

But unless your eye or brain can detect what they're doing, it can feel hopeless.

Sometimes having it broken out like this really helps. I found this amazing too!

So really, perfect practice makes perfect. Or at least saves time and avoids forming bad habits along the way.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Forgive me this long letter—I had not the time to make it short."

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.

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.

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.

I wouldn't recommend consuming art like we do documentation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

GP was echoing the article's point that writing one sentence per line lets you notice, and vary, your line lengths.

Ah. If that's the case (and I can see how it might be) I misunderstood. Thanks.

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

Of course. Hence

> But several together become monotonous.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I can highly recommend "The Heavenly City of the 18-th Century Philosophers" by Carl Becker.

Sebastian Barry is a master. Try Days Without End.

Quotes: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/50666270-days-without-...

The criminally unknown Janni Howker borders on poetry in her prose. Try Martin Farrell.

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

The comment was a "yes, and" not a "no, but"

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 - which includes that Gary Provost "tour de force".

My favorite excerpt from that book!

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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