One Line Per Sentence

Chris Maiorana has another thought provoking post that advocates the use of one line sentences. The idea is that each sentence ends not just with a period but with a newline. That seems a little unnatural but has a lot to recommend it.

I don’t do that anymore but I used to. I wrote two books where every sentence was a separate line. This was before my Emacs days so I was using Vim but it worked pretty much like it would in Emacs. If the sentence was long, the line would wrap to fit on the screen but the wrap was virtual, much like Emacs’ visual-line-mode. Actually, using visual-line-mode means that paragraphs rather than sentences are the single lines but no one ever thinks of it that way.

I no longer remember why I used the one-line-per-sentence method for my books. It probably had something to do with the fact that they were written with Groff but as Maiorana says, there are lots of good reasons to recommend it. You can check his post for some of those reasons.

As with most things, Emacs—and in particular Org mode—has you covered. There are commands for moving between sentences and for moving those sentences up and down. That makes it easy to switch sentences around while you’re editing. None of that depends on one line per sentence, of course, but works seamlessly if you prefer that way of working.

My view is that Emacs and Org mode do away with a lot of the reasons to use one line per sentence but, of course, you like it for some of the reasons Maiorana offers or for others, Emacs has you covered. Even if you have to mix methods, Emacs will work the same way.

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