Short Sentences and More Dennard Dayle
Don’t be afraid to write short sentences and more from Dennard Dayle’s Everything Abridged
The Fix
The Passage
We looked at a blogpost titled “Four Reasons Why I Write.” The first sentence is this:
There are hundreds of reasons to write online, but I settled on four reasons for why I do it.
One of the reasons was “Create a curiosity flywheel.” In the section explaining that reason, the author wrote this passage:
I set a goal in 2020 to be more curious.
With any new habit, I knew I needed to create a flywheel if I wanted it to stick. In a flywheel, every step reinforces the next step and every spin is faster than the one before.
I started by asking “what does being more curious look like?” My answer was being curious looks like exploring more ideas and asking more questions. From there I asked, “what habit forces me to explore more ideas?”
The answer to that was writing online.
We’re going to break this fix into two posts. Here we’ll just deal with the first sentence.
Feedback
We seriously doubt there are hundreds of reasons to write online. But let’s entertain the proposition. You could write this sentence without the last six words and its meaning would not be affected:
There are hundreds of reasons to write online, but I settled on four.
You could even break this into two sentences:
There are hundreds of reasons to write online. I settled on four.
Don’t be afraid to write short sentences. Some can be very effective. Herman Melville began Moby Dick with “Call me Ishmael.” and it’s a nice contrast with the longer second sentence:
“Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.”
Odds and Ends
More from Dennard Dayle’s Everything Abridged
Here are some entries for the letter I:
idolatry: Worshipping an object that won’t judge you, tax you, or cast you into eternal torment.
illiteracy: Emancipation from headline news.
imperialism: Any straight line on a map.
Instagram: The place a better version of you lives.