1st July 2022
You will be somewhat bemused to know that this blog has featured in a style-guide for writing.
Yes, I know.
But it is true:
Want to make your readers feel smarter?
Simplify your writing.
Simple writing makes it easier to follow your thought process.
Try this little-know writing practice (+ 3 examples) >>> https://t.co/Vv26I5ZqNO pic.twitter.com/HbK4onkTKf
— Henneke Duistermaat (@HennekeD) June 28, 2022
It would appear that this blog is regarded as having a distinctive style – and that the distinctive style is, in turn, regarded as being helpful to those interested in the topics covered by this blog.
So, on this Friday afternoon – as I put together some longer pieces for next week – I thought it may interest some of you for me to write something about why this blog has this distinctive (that is, peculiar) style.
*
The main reason I write in one-sentence paragraphs on this blog is because it suits me – for it helps me organise and then express my thoughts.
With a one-sentence paragraph there is no hiding place for the author.
Either the one-sentence paragraph puts forward a worthwhile proposition or it does not.
With longer paragraphs – with multiple clauses and sentences – there is scope for waffle, inexactness, and evasion.
And so one-sentence paragraphs are a means of keeping an author sharp – they are a discipline.
Even if nobody read this blog – and one happy day constitutional law may again be so dull that nobody will read blogs about law and policy – I would still write in this style on this blog.
That may well be selfish, but it is true.
*
And just as there is no hiding place in each one-sentence paragraph this also means there is no hiding place in a sequence of one-sentence paragraphs.
If there is a fault in the reasoning or the evidence, it will stand out.
The weakness in the chain will be evident – glaringly so.
This again helps me as a writer, but it also helps you as a reader.
If I make a mistake in my reasoning or with my evidence, you can quickly work out where I have gone astray.
You can either then dismiss the point I am seeking to convey or engage in the comments below (or on Twitter).
And so if my propositions are weak and/or my observations and illustrations banal and/or my arguments unsound, you will at least know where the fault is.
*
Another advantage of short paragraphs – one-sentence or not – is that they are easier to read on the screen.
They are – for want of a better word – scrollable.
A reader may read five successive short paragraphs, but he or she may be put off from reading the same sentences in one long paragraph.
This is often not the case when reading from physical pages, but when you are reading from computer screen and other electronic devices, short crisp paragraphs are often more readable.
And this is especially helpful when there is a lot of ‘white space’ – and thanks to the generosity of my Patreon and Paypal supporters, this blog has not – yet – resorted to commercial advertising to blight the nice white space surrounding the words.
For to misquote a clever philosopher: there should be nothing outside the text.
*
Another reason why I write like this is that I was brought up in tabloid-reading households.
You may not like such newspapers – and you may prefer broadsheets with their correspondingly broad passages.
But writing brisk short sentences about current affairs is a skill in and of itself, and for most of my childhood that is how I read both news and comment.
(The veteran newspaperman Neil Wallis once told me he had guessed from my blogging that I had been brought up in a tabloid-reading household, and he was right.)
*
So there are advantages of blogging in this way, both for the author and for the readers.
But.
It is not the ‘right’ way.
And this is because there is no ‘right’ way.
There are instead ways of blogging that work for both writers and readers – and there are ways that do not.
Some of the gods of British blogging – such as Chris Grey on Brexit and Lawrence Freedman on strategy and war – provide highly readable, compelling blogs with detailed multi-sentence paragraphs.
As did the greatest of all British legal bloggers, the late Sir Henry Brooke – who, wonderfully, came to blogging after being a court of appeal judge.
His blog – which is thankfully still online years after his death – is a must-read for anyone interested in the law.
So there are a number of ways of blogging.
It all comes down to what suits the writer, and to what suits the readers (if any).
*
But.
There are disadvantages of this blog’s approach.
Some propositions are complex and so require more than can be packed into one sentence.
You then get odd-looking long sentences that try so hard to keep everything in one sentence – but they are obviously contrived, and they are as awkward to read as they are awkward to write, and so should never have been started in the first place; and they often resort to sub-clauses just to keep to the somewhat artificial one-sentence rule.
Such sentences should be avoided.
As Orwell averred after offering his rules for good political writing:
“Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”
*
So the style of this blog is adopted mainly for the selfish reason that it helps me to think clearly and to organise and express those thoughts.
And if blogging in multi-sentence paragraphs helped me do the same, then I would blog like that instead.
One-sentence paragraphs are therefore not a model, but just a technique.
*
Overall, the best guide to good writing is that it is not about the writing, but about the thinking.
If you think clearly, you will tend to write (and speak) clearly.
And if you do not think clearly, then no style-guide will help you.
For, as the techies say: garbage in, garbage out.
**
Thank you for reading – posts like this take time and opportunity cost, so please support this free-to-read independent source of commentary.
For more posts like this – both for the benefit of you and for the benefit of others, and with lots of white space(!) – please support through the Paypal box above, or become a Patreon subscriber.
***
Comments Policy
This blog enjoys a high standard of comments, many of which are better and more interesting than the posts.
Comments are welcome, but they are pre-moderated and comments will not be published if irksome.
You may only need a reading age of seven to read The Sun, but as I am sure one of their celebrity readers would observe it takes a lot of skill to convey a complex argument in a 50 word editorial.
Quite a lot of folk, including that celebrity could learn a lot from that style of writing when seeking to make a persuasive case.
That celebrity reader?
One Jeremy Corbyn.
The most distinguished practitioners of the art of tabloid writing were the political editors seeking to distill complex economic theories – that ran counter to their readers’ inclinations and economic interests – in a vocabulary of no more than 200 words.
The Sun’s political editor during the Miners strike, for example.
The counter argument against terse writing is that it is less compelling when there is no ‘right’ answer, but rather a choice between different shades of grey. Diplomacy and economics and political economy is an exercise in balancing contrasting forces.
The distinction with people from an engineering or STEM background is quite marked. Without knowing much about your forebears, this might also have played a role in your intellectual formation.
Freedman and Grey’s different styles may simply reflect their intellectual training. Seeing your Barthes, and raising you Marshall McLuhan.
You mention the Sun and that it requires a reading age of seven – I’d like to (somewhat) contradict that. When I first came across a tabloid news paper I struggled to understood a headline mentioning the ‘Gers’. English is not my first language, but I had studied to a very high level and I was frustrated that I could not understand something written for a non-academic audience.
It was not until years later that I realised that it referred to Rangers Football Club.
It taught me that seemingly simple language can still be really difficult to understand.
I suppose it would be fair to add that this format makes it easier for the pedantic reader to spot typos:
“And his is especially helpful when…”
Whether or not you find that to be a benefit I wouldn’t like to say:)
That had already been spotted and changed before you posted your comment, but thanks!
I grew up with the same newspapers. I’m not sure if that is the reason why I very much like your style but I do. (Minor typo in the first sentence.)
Typo already spotted and corrected, but thanks
Dear DAG,
Reading this made my day, thank you! I am a sometime teacher of writing skills and will use your blog as an emulation exercise.
Meanwhile, I am half way through reading Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”, in homage to his passing 100 years ago. I highly recommend the long paragraphs, which often require several readings only to find in the notes that the occasional unfathomable sentences (from a logical point of view, at least) are sometimes ungrammatical. It’s what the French would call an “effet de style”.
Best wishes and please keep it coming.
Thanks for this – it’s interesting to hear why the approach works.
I’ve started to use this approach where I can – although my use of dashes may mean that I am sneaking in two sentences for the price of one.
From my perspective, the concept of one thought per paragraph sounds a good one – making sure the thought earns its place as a paragraph.
Thanks, again.
The main problem with one-sentence paragraphs is that it effectively eliminates the concept of the paragraph.
Because if every sentence is a paragraph, then all you have done is replace the closing full stop with a full stop and a carriage return.
So you are still writing in sentences, you’re just spacing them out more on the page (or screen).
That leaves little scope, though, to group sentences together that form a discrete unit of text.
Unless, that is, you resort to non-standard punctuation, such as horizontal rules or lines of asterisks where you would otherwise insert a paragraph break.
These, though, can confuse text-to-speech software as they cannot easily be vocalised.
So the workaround to a drawback of one-sentence paragraphs can create a different drawback of its own.
It’s undeniable that one-sentence paragraphs can be easier on the eye to read.
That’s one of the reasons that speeches – designed to be read out loud – are usually formatted that way.
It makes it much easier for the speaker to follow the text and keep their place.
And, in a speech, you can add asides that are intended to guide the speaker rather than intending to be read out loud.
Although that once, famously, caught out Jeremy Corbyn when he inadvertently read out his delivery notes as well as the text.
Tabloid newspapers use one-sentence paragraphs for essentially similar reasons.
They expect their readers to be reading on the go, rather than sitting down and concentrating on the words.
And, as with a speech, the one-sentence paragraph makes it easier to keep your place when skimming through an article.
For a short article, either in print or online, one-sentence paragraphs may be justifiable for clarity and ease of scrolling.
And, of course, most tabloid newspaper articles, and most blog posts, are short.
However, for longer text, their lack of logical grouping can make the content harder, not easier, to read.
It may be worth noting that the page on which Orwell lists his six rules – ending with the quoted comment on barbarism – consists of just three paragraphs together with the six numbered rules.
Times change, of course, and Orwell’s rules are not necessarily universally applicable.
Nor do rules written for print necessarily translate to the screen.
But I do wonder what he would have made of the modern preference to simplify the structure of text to the absolute minimum.
I see one-sentence paragraphs as a useful writing practice (to improve one’s writing) rather than a recommended style.
It’s a useful practice because in the world of business writing (my home patch), I come across a lot of wordy soups—a lot of ideas crammed in one sentence and too many sentences in one paragraph. Everything becomes meaningless.
What I like about the practice of writing one-sentence paragraphs is that it forces the writer to make each sentence matter. Each sentence has to be meaningful, and each sentence has to follow the previous one logically.
Your blog is an excellent example of this practice. Law and policy aren’t my field of expertise (and English is my second language) but I can follow your arguments with ease. I salute you for that.
More elegant writing styles exist but we don’t always need elegance. Clarity trumps elegance.
With much appreciation,
Henneke
Hmm. I fear my “style” – if I have one; I suppose everyone must – is over-long multi-sentence expository paragraphs, containing florid reams of ill-disciplined and barbarous waffle and inexactness, and occasional tangential digression, but I hope not evasion. Perhaps that is why you have a successful and enlightening blog and I don’t ;) Have a good weekend.
I’m not a fan of one sentence paragraphs. Clearly I’m happy that they are your chosen style and I don’t mind that.
But
One word paragraphs are going too far. Enough.
😉
Agreed.
Context is everything.
Brevity is fine for complex, technical concepts.
Or if you’re writing Haiku. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku ).
But try the same approach with Hemingway and you lose everything. (https://www.thegentlemansjournal.com/article/5-ernest-hemingway-passages-every-gentleman-know/)
For middle-ground compromise, try Watterson. (https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25)
“I like to verb words.”
“Verbing weirds language.”
Classic.
A fascinating and informative comment. Your blog is certainly very clear and easy to read.
One add-on, not directly relevant to your blog. For clarity, I wish that normal articles – that is, ones written in longer paragraphs like, say, Lawrence Freedman, used the convention – which I am told is normal in the security services – of making proper names prominent by using capitals. If you are speed-reading an article in a newspaper or website then you may have to go back, with difficulty, when you meet a proper name that you cannot remember meeting before.
If it was obvious that it was Lawrence FREEDMAN or David Allen GREEN being referred to, then each reference to that person could easily be spotted.
I believe Christopher STEELE used this convention in his reporting of Donald TRUMP’S alleged interest in golden showers.
Like police witness statements
Exactly, and for the same reason.
I am neither a lawyer nor a constitutional expert, so much of the material you discuss is unfamiliar territory. I find your style immensely helpful as it enables me easily to pause and make sure I have fully digested each point you make before moving on to the next one. I used to do quite a lot of public speaking and soon discovered that if a speech or address cannot be reduced to a series of points rather like one of your posts it is unlikely to be very effective.
As an English teacher…….I like your style!!
Your writing style is one of the things that makes your blog so readable and clear, at least for this non-lawyer.
I wonder if you have come across Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Kinkenborg? When I came across it, just before the pandemic, it struck me that his approach to writing has quite a lot in common with yours. His basic thesis is that the sentence is the fundamental unit that the prose writer deals with, and which they spend most of their time building, amending and destroying. I think you would enjoy it if you don’t know it already.
Having spent some time this afternoon reading a blog post from Dominic Cummings (albeit with very interesting content) it is a breath of fresh air to read one of your posts (with equally interesting content).
I always thought it was based on the way judges set out their judgments and so makes perfect sense in a legal blog.
I guess judges do this for the same reasons. It’s easier to follow and see if there are any mistakes in the reasoning.
Thank you
Lovely.
I like this format for your blog.
It’s easy to refer back a subject within the text rather than be confronted by large blocks of narrative.
On the other hand I will continue to read it in whichever format it may arrive.
Your writing has always reminded me of that of Edward de Bono, who I rate very highly. So I was interested to read your comment that “it is not about the writing, but about the thinking”.
An interesting and thoughtful post. Thank you. I wish more bloggers could adopt your crisp and clear style. And perhaps even more fervently I wish they could adopt your your approach to producing well researched and thoughtful content.
But
I did wonder if you were going to devote future articles to the subject of Scotland? Given Ms Sturgeon’s recent interventions, I’d have thought the future state of the Union would be a topic ripe for discussion.
I’d like to second the point about Scotland. I was writing an email to a friend earlier today, where I tried to lay out the principles which are likely to come up in the Section 30 courtcase and I realised how little I knew.
I would really appreciate to get a better understanding and I am certain that an article by DAG would be really helpful, in the same way that I learned a lot about the idea of ‘necessity’.
Probably the best thinker (and one of the best ever copywriters) in the advertising world does exactly what you say – a sentence at a time building to an effective conclusion – here’s an example:
https://davetrott.co.uk/2022/06/how-to-get-better-work-out-of-agencies/
The great Lord Denning wrote his judgements in short sentences probably for the same reason.
Am not a Denning fan – and sometimes I think he was trapped by his own style
First of all, don’t ever change.
Now, I hope you will write a detailed post on Dobbs v Jackson. I really want to lay into that.
Am doing a thing on that at the moment, but not for this blog
If you would indulge me, I’ve done some analysis on it that I’d like to share.
I’m sad that the dissent seems to have missed a trick or two. I would have argued the following key point that the majority are wrong on the common law because of a failure to look at the reasons why a pre-quickening abortion was unlawful and gave way to murder where it took the mother’s life.
The common law prior to 1803 permitted pre-quickening abortions but made out an offence of murder where, for example, a physician administered a poison intended to destroy the pre-quickened foetus (explained as not yet showing movement) but unintentionally killed the mother.
As another example, Henry de Bracton’s 13th-century treatise explained that if a person has “struck a pregnant
woman, or has given her poison, whereby he has caused
abortion, if the foetus be already formed and animated, and
particularly if it be animated, he commits homicide.” This actually comes into play supporting the reasoning of the court!
This is not because of any recognition of the life of the foetus in and of itself. It would have been unlawful because it would have been an assault. Despite that a woman in the 19th century and before was not considered to have condoned self-regard, there was no punishment for successfully causing her own miscarriage. This is significant.
Not even the father could stake a claim in forcing the woman to carry the pregnancy to term. There was no legal recognition of the life of a foetus or its connection to anyone other than the mother prior to quickening. The common law simply made it murder to attempt an abortion against the mother’s wishes, resulting in her death. It was the mother’s intention (choice) to birth the child that gave the pre-quickened foetus any status that deserved the law’s protection.
There was no separate murder or even manslaughter charge for the consequent death of the foetus, which would have been unavoidable. Therefore, the proto-felony-murder discussion is nonsense. The malice aforethought that Blackstone mentions certainly refers to an act against the mother’s wishes, and perhaps against her knowledge.
If a woman died after taking a poison with the intention of terminating her own pregnancy, would that have been ruled a suicide?
All the old cases which the majority relies on involve harm to the foetus that was against the mother’s wishes.
But, as the dissent points out, if the early history had obviously supported abortion rights, the majority would simply have asserted that only the 14 amendment ratifiers’ views are germane.
I cannot escape the conclusion that the majority consider that when it comes to the question of whether a pregnancy should be carried to term, the mother has no rights at all. Turn it on its head and suppose that at the opposite extreme a state passes a law requiring that a woman must terminate an early term pregnancy if the father is known and does not consent to the birth.
How would Alito’s regime deal with this? They have left it wide open. Is this balancing exercise really to be left entirely to state legislatures? Or course not. If, as early law shows, the termination of a pre-quickened pregnancy was only lawful with the mother’s assent, then the corollary is that that mother’s choice to carry that pregnancy is also hers alone. Yes, there is a choice.
A couple of mid-19th century American state supreme court judgements offer insight into the understanding of the common law position at the time:
https://cite.case.law/mass/50/263/
http://fas-history.rutgers.edu/clemens/NJLaw/cooper1849.html
I read your post immediately after https://sive.rs/1s which talks about writing one sentence per line in the editing process. Both these posts have really made me think about how to write
It is a tightrope, either look like Hemingway or go full Tonto, as I dealt with recently, words so arcane that I never bothered looking them up in the OED.
I’m extremely grateful for the much too generous reference to my own blog and blogging style. As I’ve already said on Twitter in response, my guiding principle is to ‘make very word count’ – so whilst I write long posts in longish paragraphs, with many sub-clauses, each word does (or should do) a job. In that sense, the style is economical, initial appearances to the contrary, albeit in a very different way to DAG’s, also economical, style. Both have at their heart a ‘discipline’ – DAG’s apposite word – of using words with care in order to seek clarity.
As DAG says, there is no ‘right’ way, but I think that the various kinds of ‘good way’ probably have some kind of similar discipline at their heart. I think Dominic Cumming’s blogs are not good because they lack such discipline. That’s not a comment on their length (or their content), but on the writing style. However, style and content can’t be entirely separated because the ultimate pay-off of ‘discipline’ is, via clarity, logical argument.
I much admire DAG’s writing style, which I’ve often described as limpid and elegant. In my listing of my top Brexit commentators/ sources (https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/p/for-thosewho-may-be-interested-list-of.html), DAG features in my ‘top 5’ where I describe him thus: “Like great philosophers, there’s a cool clarity to the best legal minds and David Allen Green exemplifies this. Everything he writes exudes logic, and in the legal minefield of Brexit (and more widely) he has provided a clear pathway for non-lawyers to understand what is at stake, and done so with great humour and intellectual elegance.”
But I couldn’t write in his style, and would be foolish to try. The way I write my blog may partly be because of the nature of is subject matter. It is undoubtedly also a result of being a social science academic, although I would claim (and hope) that I write more clearly and accessibly than most social scientists. Even my academic writing aspires to readability, and in fact features in Helen Sword’s book ‘Stylish Academic Writing’ (https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674064485).
The specific issue of paragraph length is difficult, and one I struggle with. Presumably because of ‘scrollability’ the trend amongst journalists seems to be towards shorter paragraphs. I’m aware that my paragraphs tend to be overly long, but I hope that each comprises a more or less self-contained sub-argument. For the reasons he explains, DAG generally writes single sentence (sometimes even single word) paragraphs, so that each one contains an individual element of the argument. Again, our different approaches in form are not dissimilar in function, in that each approach strives for logical clarity. And whilst, again, there’s clearly no ‘right’ way, a writer who generally uses long paragraphs does gain one particularly useful tool (though of course the converse may apply), similar to that of a bowler (in cricket) who generally bowls line and length but occasionally slips in a bouncer.
It allows a rarely-used single sentence paragraph to really emphasise an important point.
Fascinating. It reminds me of a thing I was told as a new policy person. Clarity of thought leads to clarity of options, which leads to clarity of expression.
Dear Mr Green, I must confess that I had never given any thought to your writing style – I am reading your articles and appreciating them as they are very clear and make complex points easy to understand. Especially so for people like me who have got no legal training.
Your piece on ‘necessity’ was a masterpiece, it enabled me to understand the concept and then understand the politics of the NI bill. I could even explain it to someone else and they understood.
Thank you for your writing.
A thing should be as simple as possible – and no simpler.
I do enjoy your blog and the sentence/paragraph style suits a clear linear path to ‘the truth’.
The path from a schoolboy’s ‘what I did in the holidays’ to a professional report or a thesis or a standup presentation is a long and tortuous one. Many produce a product that suffers from the TLDR defect. But never our gracious host – thankyou.
“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” Blaise Pascal
Shortest ever story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” attrib. Ernest Hemingway
One wouldn’t want Henry James writing a recipe book.
One wouldn’t wish Jane Austen to simplify her sentences or the richness of her meaning/s would be lost.
One wouldn’t wish David Allen Green to lengthen his sentences or the sharp clarity would be lost.