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The Curse of the One-Sentence Paragraph

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Posted By: Hazymac, 2/18/2023 1:09:03 PM

I’ve been noticing lately that the English paragraph seems to be sinking gradually into the world of the minimal like Michael Crichton’s shrunken people in Micro, a practice that hovers between the silly and the technical. This is especially the case with many of the political articles of our day. The once-mighty paragraph that adorned our best writing in history and politics, as well as literature, is getting shorter by the day, often settling into the one-sentence fragment. Not only a block of print on a page, the paragraph is a unit of thought, a means of conveying a description, a theory, a report, an impression, a complex idea, or a

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Reply 1 - Posted by: Californian 2/18/2023 1:39:30 PM (No. 1406150)
I don't see a problem with one sentence paragraphs. At all. I like them. Especially for posting online. :-)
6 people like this.

Reply 2 - Posted by: Miss Ann Thrope 2/18/2023 1:55:51 PM (No. 1406159)
It's called "dumbing down" to accommodate both the writer and the reader. Likewise, I've noticed that books published within the past ten or fifteen years have double spaced the lines, which uses twice the amount of paper. (Where are the tree huggers?)
7 people like this.

Reply 3 - Posted by: JackBurton 2/18/2023 2:08:48 PM (No. 1406169)
I taught English. We marked down for 'run-on sentences.' I guess I should still be teaching.
9 people like this.

Reply 4 - Posted by: Proud Texan 2/18/2023 2:19:47 PM (No. 1406172)
Sometimes the writer just needs to get to the point because some readers don't have all the time in the world to meander around in a longer than needed paragraph. This article is a great example. I read over one and a half paragraphs and will not waste more time with it.
3 people like this.

Reply 5 - Posted by: Flyball Dogs 2/18/2023 2:44:15 PM (No. 1406188)
I’ve had similar thoughts with contemporary Christian (praise) songs. No longer hymns, with stories and meaningful lyrics. Instead, we have one line messages, with a 6-word chorus, sung and repeated 49 times. Worship has almost become a cliche. Ditto for articles conveying contemporary thoughts and ideas.
10 people like this.

Reply 6 - Posted by: smokincol 2/18/2023 4:48:49 PM (No. 1406259)
the problem is not with the author or the topic it's the reader, who has a .32nd micro second time span if he/she is able to read at all the art of writing began with the birth of the computer and the abbreviation and deliberate editing of written material to make it palatable for the lower lever reading public, of which there are far too many but thanks to our public schools the problem is not going away nor do they want it to
1 person likes this.

Reply 7 - Posted by: WV.Hillbilly 2/18/2023 5:09:24 PM (No. 1406271)
The average American has a 7th grade reading level. That's why you see one sentence paragraphs. Plus lots of pictures.
2 people like this.

Reply 8 - Posted by: seamusm 2/18/2023 6:03:59 PM (No. 1406304)
Even worse - the laziness of copy and pasted Twitter posts. The 'author' need not bother to write anything at all. Like cutting out letters from magazines for the note handed to the bank teller saying, 'Hand over all the money.'
1 person likes this.

Reply 9 - Posted by: jimkata 2/18/2023 6:18:55 PM (No. 1406315)
In my graduate class on Human Factors we had to practice dumbing down a paragraph for the general populace. It had to be at a 9th grade level of English. The class had a computer program to tell you if you used large words or long sentence length.
0 people like this.

Reply 10 - Posted by: anniebc 2/18/2023 10:50:53 PM (No. 1406514)
Just like everything else, we're losing our language, and writing is atrocious these days. The strangest thing is that there are so many helps (Grammarly, spell check, etc.), and people still struggle with basic sentence structure.
2 people like this.

Reply 11 - Posted by: Tank 2/19/2023 9:32:29 AM (No. 1406705)
Spot on opinion piece. I stopped reading VDH because of this. Great thinker and speaker, terrible writer.
1 person likes this.

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