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Chunky over Smooth | |
January 19th, 2018 | |
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This phost is not about peanut butter, | |
but about plain text. | |
I recently read a blog post [0] | |
shared by dbucklin [1] | |
over on the #gopher channel on irc.sdf.org | |
about writing text that breaks text | |
into chunks of semantic ideas or sentences. | |
While it seems to make the text a bit longer | |
it really does help with readability | |
as well as version controll diffs | |
and even editing. | |
As I've been writing this phost | |
I've been moving sentences around | |
either in part or in whole. | |
Having a period always at the end of a line | |
and sentences always begin on a new line | |
is remarkably helpful. | |
There is a bit of a congative disconnect | |
while I adjust to breaking up my text | |
in a way that doesn't feel as natural | |
as my writing style normally is, | |
but that can be attributed to it being new | |
and my forced attention on the style | |
to ensure I'm doing it properly. | |
Even now, | |
as I end this second paragraph | |
the technique is becoming more natural in flow. | |
I'd like to know | |
whether this format | |
makes things more difficult for you to read | |
or makes it easier to scan. | |
Please send me an email, | |
a toot on mastodon, | |
or a phlog reply | |
with your thoughts. | |
I see this as an easy way to | |
author my markdown blogs, | |
since the natural formatting of markdown | |
will ride these paragarphs into a single block. | |
Writing this way for drafts | |
also makes a lot of sense. | |
I'm really only concerned about | |
using it in its broken--almost poetry-like--format | |
in a medium like gopher | |
where people will read it this way, | |
or in my books | |
where I will want to | |
eventually refomat things into manuscript form | |
with clear dialogue formatting | |
and section breaks. | |
I think I'll give this a try for a while. | |
[0] One sentence per line | |
[1] dbucklin |