Follow-up: One Sentence Per Line
I first read about this method here: https://sive.rs/1s/ and I thought it was a neat enough idea to try it out. It's not for me, although I still appreciate the potential usefulness of it and that it can be helpful for some people. I use a variation of it when first feeling out some ideas. Mike Grindle mentioned a similar method using bullet points, for example.
But I am a little disappointed in Derek Sivers' blog post. In it, he identifies the benefits of writing one sentence per line, and shows how useful it can be. I didn't realize it before when I read it, but there's no sign of any place where he found the idea in the first place.
Fast forward to this past Tuesday when I read this post from tiramisu: a writing tool + re: make them reject you. In the post he cites an exercise from Verlyn Klinkenborg's Several Short Sentences About Writing1. It looked very familiar.
Here’s another way to make your prose look less familiar.Turn every sentence into its own paragraph.
(Hit Return after every period. If writing by hand, begin each new sentence at the left margin.)
What happens?
A sudden, graphic display of the length of your sentences
And, better yet, their relative length—how it varies, or doesn’t vary, from one to the next.
Variation is the life of prose, in length and in structure.
It goes on, but I realized that Sivers' post was paraphrasing this exercise. Maybe he read it from somewhere else, or it's not that original of an exercise and Klinkenborg himself was inspired by someone else too. But it rubs me the wrong way. It just seems like he is passing off the idea as his own, a little bit.
Please, cite your sources.