Artful Sentences

What Hacker News says

1. cbfrenchSep 2026
   It’s good—better than the much-revered Elements of Style, imho, which is overly prescriptive and frankly unhelpful at turns, even if it’s well written.

   But my all-time favorite is Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. It illustrates the variety of English sentence structures in an ordered way with a plethora of examples. The approach is not prescriptive; rather, it allows you inductively to develop a feel for the syntactical rhythms of the language.

   Also, I love Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One. It’s a lovely, entertaining little book, filled with Fish’s insights as an eminent literary critic. What I appreciate most about the book is that Fish walks you through a number of examples and explains how and why they work, so you can walk away as both a better writer and a better reader.

   Show morethread
2. VeenFeb 2023
   I will second the Style recommendation. It explains how to write elegant sentences, whereas Strunk and White is just a list of the writers' prejudices. I'd also recommend Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style by Virginia Tufte (who was Edward Tufte's mother).
   thread
3. VeenMay 2019
   Strunk and White or Zinsser can help people to improve their writing for emails or reports at work, but both contain a lot of information that simply isn't true.

   As someone who writes for a living, nothing gets my goat more than a client asking me to remove the passive clauses in the 10,000-word ebook I've just written for them because they read that passives are bad in Strunk and White, or they pasted the text into Grammarly and got some squiggly lines.

   There are some style books that offer advice that is both useful and true.

   - Sense of Style, by Steven Pinker

   - Artful Sentences: Syntax As Style, by Virginia Tufte

   - Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose, by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner

   If people really want to know what's what where grammar is concerned, they should look at "A Student's Introduction to English Grammar" by Huddleston and Pullum. Or, even better "The Cambridge Grammar of English" by the same authors (although at 1800 pages, it's not for the faint of heart).

   Show morethread
4. dmixSep 2017
   > Related, I am working on this as I've been asked to write a book.

   If this topic interests you I recommend this book on crafting sentences written by the mother of the famous "Edward Tufte" (one of the most influential designers in the history of software):

   https://www.amazon.com/Artful-Sentences-Syntax-as-Style/dp/0...

   I've read a number of writing books and I find the key to good writing comes down to writing good sentences. It's also a critical part of being succint, only second to trimming the non-essential from the higher level ideas.

   This one highlights many great sentences written by famous authors and breaks down their syntax.

   Show morethread
5. buzzcutFeb 2014
   This is built on so many bad assumptions. At best the "rules" it's trying to enforce are training-wheel rules, the sorts of rules given to novice writers to help them avoid flabby, purple writing.

   But the assumption that short sentences are better than long sentences, or that simple sentences are better than complex sentences is just wrong. There are all kinds of reasons why you might use one type of sentence over the other or vary them for effect. You might be concerned about rhythm, or you might be attempting to establish a certain tone, distance, closeness, formality, or lack of.

   We have this weird cultural obsession with the clarity, brevity, and simpleness of writing. Jacques Barzun even wrote a writing manual called Simple and Direct, as if these are the only virtues to be found in writing.

   But I think you want as many tools as possible to achieve the effects you want. There is a huge rich tradition here, that we've largely lost, a tradition that teaches about hypotactic and paratactic sentences, that teaches about periodic and loose sentences, that teaches how to make left and right branching sentences, that teaches subordination, that teaches rhetorical devices, and that advocates (at times) longer, more complex sentences for richer and denser writing.

   Thankfully there are a number of books out (some of them) recently that seem to be fighting back against the austerity view of writing.

   They include, if you're interested: - Brooks Landon, Building Great Sentences - Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence - Virginia Tufte, Artful Sentences, Syntax as Style - Richard Lanham, Analyzing Prose

   I'd just add, there is nothing wrong with being simple and clear. There is nothing wrong with cutting out needless or weak adverbs. But there is something wrong with worshiping the austerity style as, at all times, the best and the only way to go. There are lots and lots of reasons and occasions to deviate from it, but the style orthodoxy these days is the one assumed by that (admittedly cool) website.

   Show morethread
6. clauerJan 2014
   In the craftsman's toolbox I would add Virginia Tufte's lovely and inspiring book "Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style". To write better, one must write better sentences. Start here.
   thread