Anyone who has slogged through a Charles Dickens novel or a Wi-Fi router instruction manual knows what William Shakespeare meant when he wrote, "Brevity is the soul of wit." We couldn't agree more, and that's why we're big fans of the site One Sentence.
A self-described "exercise in brevity" the site is a compilation of more than a thousand life stories - all told in a single sentence.
"Most great stories from one's life can be boiled down to one really good sentence that gets across the main point but also leaves the reader wondering what happened leading up to that point, and what happened afterward," says Ryan MacMichael, the site's administrator, who started One Sentence in August 2006. He now receives hundreds of submissions each week and publishes about 10 percent of them. Some are funny; some are sad; all of them get to the point.
To wit: "I was nearly sent to the hospital because I could not convince the school nurse that my head had always been this shape."
"The mysterious animal hissing under the towel turned out to be a can of Right Guard."
"Seven months after she ruined my life, her name is still in all of my passwords."
"You read a sentence like, 'Instead of him they sent back a folded flag, and when I was alone I tore it to pieces,' and it's not just a story about a woman whose family member died during a military deployment," MacMichael says. "It's about a woman who was so sad, so frustrated, so angry with her country and/or the family member that she tore up the very symbol of that country and that person's service. Was she patriotic before? Is she becoming politically active now? Have her political views or her views on war changed? A single sentence can say so much while still inspiring further questions."
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