arundelo comments on Rhetoric for the Good - Less Wrong

49 Post author: lukeprog 26 October 2011 06:52PM

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Comment author: arundelo 25 October 2011 11:20:01PM 0 points [-]

I think "end" is the most important word here (though it maybe isn't the most "impacting"), and it is about as close to the end as it can be.

Comment author: pedanterrific 25 October 2011 11:27:16PM 1 point [-]

"When constructing sentences, put the most important word at the end."

But my initial point was mostly that "the most impacting words" is a really awkward and unclear construction. And I think the disagreement in the responses to my comment as to which word would be the "most impacting" (and precisely what that means) rather bears me out.

Comment author: arundelo 25 October 2011 11:42:41PM *  1 point [-]

I agree. (I mistook your point.)

Edit: Joseph Williams (who wrote Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, which lukeprog mentioned in the original post) has a subtler version of this rule:

Put at the end of your sentence the newest, the most surprising, the most significant information: information that you want to stress -- perhaps the information that you will expand on in your next sentence.

That's from page 48 of his Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, which I think blows Strunk and White out of the water. (I believe it's a different book from the one lukeprog mentioned, though if so I'm sure they cover similar material.)