James Somerton was making $170,000 a year with nearly 6 million views and 267,000 subscribers on YouTube, until…

  • TheActualDevil@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    I have no issue with the content provided, but I wanted to give a little constructive criticism on the structure of your writing. Real small. When you say,

    There was another aspect to this video, which was that when Somerset actually…

    When you say there is a thing, the reader is going to assume the next thing you write to be that thing. So you don’t need the “which is that.” You can just launch right into what you’re going to say, you already set it up. You basically said “I have a thing to say. The thing I have to say is this:”

    Everything else is informative and well presented. No other notes.

    • Gnome Kat@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      11 months ago

      No other notes.

      There is another aspect to your comment, which was that it made me laugh really hard.:)

      No other notes.

    • SomeoneElse@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      Would you need a semicolon then or not?

      There was another aspect of the video; Somerset actually made up…

      • UNWILLING_PARTICIPANT@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        Eh doesn’t really flow compared to the original. I would have to reread to understand.

        I’m all for omitting unnecessary words, but certain cliché connectors are so ubiquitous that they act as punctuation. You don’t notice them, but reading is less comfortable when they’re missing.

      • TheActualDevil@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I don’t know that you need a semicolon but you could definitely use one, and that would probably be the best way. Semicolons are for when two complete sentences are related. But they can still be formatted as two sentences, or even the same sentence with a comma. Many sentences contain parts that could be standalone sentences. But reading back over the original sentence again I would probably say it can just be rewritten to be more straightforward.

        “Another aspect to this video is that Somerset, when actually trying to write some of the material himself, produced complete garbage.”

        Mostly I’ve just been reading a lot of philosophy recently which tends to run on a long and complex sentence structure that’s unnecessary and could be a lot simpler, so this kind of thing has been at the front of my mind lately. That’s probably the only reason I even noticed in the first place.