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---
title: 'One sentence per line'
categories:
- blog
abstract: Why I write one sentence per line
date: 2023-12-15T12:00:48+02:00
draft: false
---
Earlier today I've stumbled upon a blog post called "[Writing one sentence per line](https://sive.rs/1s)".
By a complete random dice toss, this is what I've been doing for some time.
That blog post focuses on the quality of writing, of which I have not thought.
I'm far from writing proper English, so sentence flow is something for future me.
My reasoning was strictly technical.
Why do we have paragraphs?
To make reading easier.
It's common knowledge that one paragraph contains one thought.
I hate reading texts where this rule is not followed, and I've seen some crazy stuff.
Some folks try to "paint" with words - mixing font sizes, positions, order.
There even is a book that uses this gimmick as selling point[^house-of-leaves]
[^house-of-leaves]: [*House of Leaves* by Mark Danielewski](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/36526/house-of-leaves-by-mark-z-danielewski/).
I've been told it's great.
But it makes writing more difficult.
I don't use mouse (vim and emacs are all I trust), so going to n-th word in a few hundred long line takes some time.
Yes, there are ways to snipe to a given position or to move by sentence, but I don't use those.
I could also use a mouse pointer, but I refuse to acknowledge that possibility.
Luckily, I write digitally and how the text looks *raw* is not how it looks when *processed*.
Very often new lines are not important.
In markdown single new lines are ignored and presented as sentence[^md-two-spaces]
To create a new paragraph, you need to use two (or more) empty lines.
[^md-two-spaces]: you can bypass that by having two spaces at end of a line.
Similar behavior is used in Latex.
In HTML new lines don't matter at all as you need to explicitly state a new paragraph or even a new line.
Having one sentence per lines allow for easy navigation, easy restructuring and good-looking diffs.
It is also another reason **not** to use WYSIWG editors (sigh, Confluence) as they limit the writing process significantly.
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