the almighty tangent

This illustration, introduced by R.B. Kaplan as "contrastive rhetoric", represents typical paragraph structures used by speakers of different languages. Other cultures tend to express themselves in a less linear fashion than speakers of English (represented by a straight line).

What I find most interesting is the tendency of the Romance and Slavic groups to go off-task. In a sense, this deviation legitimizes my penchant for massive parenthetical asides. I like tangents. I go on them all the time, but I always get to my point...eventually. I used to think my frequent digressions were a shortcoming, but perhaps I was just tacitly steeped in romance language tradition. I feel validated.