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Comment by gnulinux | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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."

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.

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