I wholeheartedly agree with you on the paragraph you found -it is very well written prose, as far as I can tell – and I am no expert on Italian – but then I expect a high standard of writing from professional journalists. I agree that an English writer would have used full stops where the colons exist. But the colons function as a form of full stop anyway, and create a sort of pause. This allows a reader to absorb the words and their meanings more effectively, I consider.

Actually, it’s not the writing, as long as it is not overly verbose, which worries me, nor the punctuation – it’s the length of the paragraphs – without white space – they look daunting – and this puts me off, regardless of how well written they might be.

As for punctuation – again, I have no problem with this – Italian is not English. However, I believe both languages can help readers by presenting them with shorter paragraphs – especially with regard to ‘official’ texts. Long, daunting paragraphs still do exist in English and some, people like Bryan A Garner, have been battling for years to boil such paragraphs down to more readable lengths.

That said, sometimes long paragraphs are a necessity. Sometimes, but not always.

I don’t know if you have noticed, but the online version of La Repubblica is starting to use shorter paragraphs with more white space. I would be very interested to know what the “bounce rate”, and “time on page” metrics were both before and after shorter paragraphs and white space were introduced.

FYI “bounce rate” is the percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than moving to other pages within the same site. I think “time on page” is self explanatory.

Anyway, please do draw my attention to some well written paragraphs or even complete articles.

Have a good weekend.

Kind regards,

Alex

“Ma è anche uno spettacolo sublime che ridefinisce le nostre reali dimensioni di uomini piccoli piccoli: la polvere che si solleva e assume in cielo forme barocche e ricciolute, i lapilli spruzzati in aria, il risveglio di un vulcano che, nascosto nel ghiaccio, da duecento anni non dava spasmi di vita, neppure un flebile segnale, nessuna pulsazione: il suo cuore di fuoco si era fermato, il magma non circolava.”

I am pretty sure that an English speaker would have placed two full stops instead of the colons. But then again, he would have not attempted to write prose in a sort of poetical form, like journalist Francesco Merlo does here. His intent was not to report news, which appears somewhere else in the main article on the same subject, but to give a feeling of the force of nature behind this event, and to do so he adopted a style involving long paragraphs with a certain rhythm which, if it were broken by full-stops, would result jolty.
Concerning the terms he used, the only combination of words not sounding right to my ears is “spasmi di vita” , a true “licenza poetica” of dubious result. The rest of the text flows well and conveys both the meaning and the writer’s personality behind the pen, or rather, behind the computer keys.

Ciao ciao for now
Annamaria

P.s. Funny, I looked for a website in English for my American husband and I end up writing here myself…

Short, very short, sentences can be irritating to us too! Indeed, the shorter they are, the more aggressive they can be, or may be perceived as being so.

I do read papers like La Repubblica, Il Corriere, Il Fatto Quotidiano and Il Sole 24 ORE, often, and some of their articles are fine. Others are dense, and the writers seem to use 100 words to say what could be said with less than half, or fewer. Whereas Italians might expect this, I’m not convinced that they appreciate it.

I accept that there are cultural differences, but do feel that Italians might be happier to read short, succinct paragraphs – I’ve been told as much by Italians who know English, and like the fact that English writers are often more succinct than Italian writers.

As for repetition, your example: “I went to Rome. Rome is a beautiful city. I saw many monuments in Rome”, would not be good style in English! When nouns are repeated too close to one another in English, the result does not read well. However, I have found Italians to be somewhat paranoid about repetition when writing in English. There, I have repeated the word “English” several times, although I don’t think this will annoy too many native-English readers, although it might worry some Italians!

You do make a very valid point when you say that the way a paragraph is written depends very much upon the skill of the writer. This holds true in both English and Italian.

Please point me towards a long paragraph written in Italian which you consider to be well written. You could even copy and paste one into a comment.

Thanks for your observations.

Best,

Alex

There are other differences. We avoid repeating the same term in a paragraph, you do not. We would not say: “I went to Rome. Rome is a beautiful city. I saw many monuments in Rome” because in second grade we are taught to change “Rome” with “the capital of Italy” or some other phrase, to avoid repeating the same word.

A long paragraph, with more than one subordinate sentence, can be a real pleasure to read. The trouble starts when the writer is not good but uses long paragraphs, and the wrong pairing of nouns and adjectives, or nouns and verbs, goes on and on. But it does not depend on the structure of my language.

Sorry I did not reply sooner, but your comment was eaten by the spam system.

Thanks for visiting. Good to hear that you enjoy hearing how others view Italians.

As for these paragraphs, maybe you are right – Italians may hate paragraphs!

Not sure why, but that famous English writer Dickens loved long paragraphs too!

All the best,

Alex