Re: Warn on mid-input line sentence endings

[josh]

Hey Alex,

Thanks a lot for the clarifications, I agree with your reasoning.

On Mon, May 1, 2023 at 8:30 PM Alejandro Colomar <alx.manpages@gmail.com> wrote:
> What is ventilated in the context of prose?  Not too clear to me just by
> reading dict(1).

Regarding "Ventilated Prose", it's more of an endearing figure of speech than a
technical categorization. Think of a hot stuffy room, and the transformation
that occurs when you open the window and let in a cool breeze -- the room
becomes well ventilated. So too with a stuffy paragraph.

Here's a relevant passage about the origin of the phrase from
https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/ventilated-prose,

> In the 1930s Buckminster Fuller (he of the domes, but also of many other
> things) was doing research for the Phelps Dodge Corporation. His boss could
> not read Fuller’s reports, but found them perfectly intelligible when read
> aloud by the author.
>
> For Fuller's own account, see below.
>
> [...]
>
> Though the [...] presentation had been developed under the close observation 
> of
> the corporation’s Director of Research, my final written presentation of it
> was declared by the Director to be incomprehensible. Disgruntled, I re-read
> it carefully and returned to the Director saying, "Please listen to this,"
> and proceeded to read in spontaneously metered "doses" from my manuscript.
> As I read I also watched for expressions of comprehension on the Director’s
> face. The Director pondered each verbal dose, and when his face signalled
> "that is clear" I would intuitively measure out the next portion. Finally,
> the Director said, "Why don’t you write it that way?" I said, "I am
> reading directly and without skipping from my original text"; so the
> Director said, "It just doesn’t read that way." The explanation was that
> the intuitive doses did not correspond to conventional syntax.
>
> When the re-written report was submitted, the Director said, "This is lucid,
> but it is poetry, and I cannot possibly hand it to the President of the
> Corporation for submission to the Board of Directors." I insisted that it
> was obviously not poetry, since both he and I knew how I had chopped up a
> conventional prose report. The Director said, "I am having two poets for
> dinner tonight and I will take this to them and see what they say." He
> returned the next day and said, "It’s too bad — it’s poetry."

Sorry to drone on about it, I just think it's very amusing :).

Josh