Some thoughts about blogging and “style”

But sometimes you want to write tortuous paragraphs.

One not only wants to be understood when one writes, but also quite as certainly not to be understood. It is by no means an objection to a book when someone finds it unintelligible. —Nietzsche

I liked this post on writing one sentence paragraphs (via Alice), and the advice seems sensible enough – indeed, I was saying the same thing in 1420 (annoyingly, I seem to have misplaced a really popular article I wrote around the same time about using tabloid conventions on the web). When you’re writing for work a terse, active style is a must.

Green’s extreme version put me in mind of the stuff Robin Rendle sometimes writes, which he likens to using PowerPoint. Each idea is neatly sectioned off, to be considered independently.

Writing here is another thing. I sometimes like a trail of short and long sentences, broken up by a fairly random cast of colons, semi-colons, em dashes or even plain, puritanical commas, forming longer, probably difficult to follow paragraphs. Depends.