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Re:Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well” by Normal_gaussian on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @07:58PM (#13487824)
I completely agree. As another native English speaker I find the highlighted passage parses incredibly naturally. It feels like a single cohesive thought without the need for back-referencing despite encompassing several 'ideas'.
Re:Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well” by TheOtherHobbes on Thursday January 26, 2017 @05:01AM (#13490089)
It's slightly stylised 19th century English, which is very different to 21st century English. We don't use run-on sentences peppered by parenthetical clauses nearly as much as we used to, so I'm not surprised some readers may find it dense.

For more modern English, I think George Orwell is very hard to beat.

For blog posts, Paul Graham is always worth reading - not so much for the content, which is often debatable, but for the style, which is reliably lucid.

But it's always a good idea to match the social register and jargon level of the target audience. Professional writers often work on a range of gigs and know how to mould English into a range of styles and voices to reach different audiences.

So I'd be skeptical of any suggestion there's a One True Style for online content or technical writing. There are certainly common standards and traditions, but they may be out of date or too company-specific to apply generally.

Re:Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well” by CamelCaseName on Thursday January 26, 2017 @12:14AM (#13488945)
It's also important to note the difference in how text is consumed online vs in a book.

I am a native English speaker and I was confused on the first pass when reading quickly and ignoring punctuation.

Reading slower and taking pauses at the commas allowed me to understand.

I think that minimizing the use of negatives and pauses helps the reader absorb the information quickly.