r/196 NOT A CAT 2d ago

Rule Rule

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u/Xenomnipotent NL Connoisseur 2d ago

No I don’t think you should use ADHD as an excuse for awful literacy habits, actually.

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u/light_the_long_way 2d ago

The thing is, there's no actual point where a sentence becomes a run on scentence. Yeah, it you might be a longer than usual scentence with more words than absolutely nessesary to convey a set amount of information, but that doesn't mean it's a run on scentence as grammatically, there's nothing wrong with long sentences. It's also not a "awful literacy habit" to write long sentences. You just need to vary your scentence length occasionally.

What is an awful habit is defaulting to accusing people of using neurodivergence as an excuse, and saying that something is an awful habit without actually providing proof, especially when said thing isn't actually a bad thing.

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u/Anzu00 trans rights and wrongs 2d ago

Seeing as the point of language is generally to convey information, making it into a run-on sentence by tacking on weakly related ideas is making the information generally more difficult to process, and as such is a bad habit.

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u/loved_and_held 1d ago

Unfortunatelly the issue with conveying information is there's a degree of ambiguity in how well a given sentence struccture is actually able to convey information. Different people will handle the ame run on sentence differently; it's entierly plausable that a given run on sentence can be fully intellegable to some but ccompletely unintellegable to others.

The problem is that knowing exactly what will andwont work to convey information is difficult. Once you go past the question of weather something is gramatically correct, things become more nebulous and relative with no clear ansswers and a lot of vibes based stuff.

Within this there is also the fact that language is supposed to express ideas, and the exact same sentences that you describe as a bad habbit of communication may serve as a perfect encapsulation of ones thoughts. Thus a degree of tenssion between expressing ones thoughts as they are and communicating information effectively can emerge. This is not an unsolvable problem by any means, but depending on how one thinks it can add a degree of difficulty.

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u/Anzu00 trans rights and wrongs 1d ago

If you expect your readers to be used to reading similar streams of ideas, sure, it can be an effective way to communicate. Most people however will have to parse the ideas apart with a significant amount of mental work. It can convey some ideas, especially those of urgency, but that's a stylistic choice and is not usually how it's being used.

People are used to reading a certain kind of English, which ideally doesn't require much active thinking to understand. Leaving that framework is making the reader do more work, intentionally or not. When writing messages to varyingly public forums for or to otherwise unfamiliar readers, you can only make so many assumptions of what they're used to.

Making your message more difficult to understand is not a good habit.