What he seems to have lost with this approach is a rhythm. It's a staccato battering with ideas. I'd much rather be seduced and cradled by writing that made me feel I'm learning by osmosis and not trepanning.
EDIT:
The author illustrates how his writing goes wrong by saying that the following paragraph:
To be brief on the sentence-level, remove words that don’t add necessary context. Extra words cause readers to slow down and do extra work. That makes it harder for them to recognize the sentence’s point. And when you bore readers, they quit reading.
is better rewritten as:
Your sentence is brief when no additional words can be removed. Being succinct is important because filler buries your talking points and bores readers into quitting.
It's not. The two sentence rewrite is ugly. The first sentence is weird because it uses "additional" (which sounds like adding something) for things that will be removed. The second sentence uses "talking points" which makes it appear the writer is aiming for sound bites and not to educate the reader.
I much prefer the first paragraph above. Partly because it makes me empathize with the trouble readers might have and makes me want to work for them. When I read the first paragraph I imagine myself, the reader; when I read the second I'm being instructed by a voice that sounds like it comes from a cold machine.
Remember to never split an infinitive.
The passive voice should never be used.
Do not put statements in the negative form.
Verbs have to agree with their subjects.
Proofread carefully to see if you words out.
If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be by rereading and editing.
=========
The above, plus Strunk & White[0], should be enough for most folks IMNSHO.
Strunk and White: fifty years of stupid grammar advice http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/2549...
The Land of the Free and the Elements of Style: everything in strunk and White is wrong http://ling.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/LandOfTheFree.pdf
> Remember to [preserve the full] infinitive.
> [Always use] the [active] voice.
> [Always] put statements in the [positive] form.
> Verbs have to agree with their subjects. (nobody9999 corrected this one already - was "has" in place of "have")
> Proofread carefully to see if you [leave] words out.
For those not in on the joke. Not sure if this would be how Safire would correct it, but I made an effort.
There is nothing wrong with splitting an infinitive. Shakespeare does it and Star Trek does it.
Passive voice is fine. Sure it can be used to make the text impersonal and hide responsibility. But is can also be used to make the text clearer and to emphasize what is important. Use it as appropriate.
That omission almost seems too perfect
If you make an effort to omit unnecessary words, your sentences will be easy for readers to understand without slowing down. It also reduces the chance that readers will get bored and quit.
I used to uncritically accept the idea that concision was the single important thing about writing. The problem is, if you only ever write in short sentences, you'll neglect the skill of writing longer sentences that flow. And if you're writing anything longer than a tweet, you really need that skill! Having a natural mix of long and short sentences leads to a less "stuttery" feeling, and has a kind of hypnotic effect pulling the reader into your text and making them feel at home.
I personally find that style very annoying. It’s especially popular on LinkedIn. When I notice that I’m reading some vertically-set essay, it’s my cue to stop scrolling and stay off LinkedIn for the next month.
Repetition is a tool. Repeating yourself is useful. When I was younger, I thought it was good to be brief, succinct, and concise (and for some purposes, it is). But with most audiences, repeating yourself several times, as I have done here, is your best chance at getting your message to actually hit home. People need to understand and process your idea from different angles and perspectives, and if you aren't able or willing to take efforts to make yourself understood, they will justifiably not make the effort to understand you either.
Or, as I could have said more succinctly, there is value in repeating an important message in different but overlapping ways.
If your reader doesn't get it, they blame you. So its wise to use all of the tools at your disposal.
The truth is, simplicity is hard. It’s about editing down to what’s essential. But not everything has to be Hemingway. Not everyone is a fan of that. So it’s also about knowing your audience, and finding your voice.
I’ll take a crack at it:
“Keep it simple. Aim for clarity. Know your audience. If a word doesn’t help move things along, get rid of it — otherwise you might put your readers to sleep.”
Changing "To be brief on the sentence-level" to "To write brief sentences" then leaving the rest would have been better.
> Keep sentences brief; unnecessary filler obscures your point and bores the reader.
"Brevity is the soul of wit."
It's very much like refactoring code. You can do it on a higher level by cutting out entire chunks of code that don't really need to be done, or on a low level by being familiar with the language's helpful syntactic sugars, best practices, to make the meaning clear and less obscured by boilerplate and "syntactic chores".
I noticed the effectiveness of low-level refactoring in prose when I first started writing academic papers. Since page limits are strict, you need to pay attention to eliminate any words that aren't necessary and are thin on semantics. This doesn't mean writing in staccato. But when you spot a paragraph where a single word spills over to an extra line, it requires a specific learnable skill to rewrite a sentence or two to eliminate the extra line. You can often tell how much someone wordsmithed around on a paper by seeing how long the last line of each paragraph is.
Of course sometimes gains are on the high level, I'm not saying that good writing is just about messing with the low level of the actual words and the grammar. Similarly to the debate whether premature optimization is the root of all evil, it's about a balance in writing too. First you must have clear thoughts on what to say and what you can leave out. But at the end, when things have settled, it is worth to go over it once again at specific places and low-level edit things to be snappier, counting words, letters and millimeters on the paper.
I find it harder to understand as well. I do get it but I see that a lot of my fellow non-native speakers will struggle with this kind of writing. Second sentence is way more complex then the whole original paragraph. "Succint", "filler", "buries", "bores into quitting" - whoah. Give me a breath, please! Is this an articatle on how to write good looking text, or easy to understand text? At first glance I though it was supposed to ilustrate the exact opposite of what it tries to ilustrate.
The whole first page is composed of only bullet points and it requires a lot of focus and effort to go through. I had no urge to click to the next page after that introduction. Is it grandiose (had to google that), or do they treat me like an idiot? Bizarre.
It's like reading a list of quotes from famous people. If you would read it aloud after 3 or 4 of these I'm done. Next ones could be a dinner recipe - I might not notice.
When I write to much and too fast (like now I am, sorry!) I like to remind myself how authors write on sites for beginners in a particular language [0][1]. It's clean and doesn't treat me like an idiot.
good question
1- You slow down - and read again
2- You don't understand
3- you get angry
4- You're done
5 - (optional) You write about it on HN because 3 and 4
I suspect people have completely different styles when reading e.g. a fiction book on a Kindle vs. a tutorial about deploying a Docker container. I wouldn't be surprised if generation/age played a factor too.
That said, the author strikes me as trying to teach something he isn't actually good at while pretending to be authorative. Most of this advice is standard stuff found in Strunk and White, Stephen King's "On Writing," and a hundred other solid books on this topic, but his style is disjointed, his examples aren't great, and then there's just the sheer silliness:
> Why? The best writing is therapy that you publish for the world to learn from.
No, it's really not.
Skip fluff. It’s boring and obscures the point.
This isn't a tutorial about "writing well" in general. It focusses on a particular way of writing: writing short articles that sell a specific idea, service or product to as many readers as possible. It's a practice that won't make great or enjoyable novels, though. And while Hemingway became famous for his terse and objective prose, so did the eclectic writing of James Joyce or the long winded storytelling of Proust.
I feel that tone of voice and style are crucial in one's writing. The words you choose, ordering of your sentences, the construction of your argument, attention for positive or negative sentiment,... shape the perception with your audience. The author only briefly glosses over those points in his fourth section, before admitting it needs expansion. And yet, without developing those, your writing won't yield much life to the topic you want to brings across.
This brings me back to the style of this tutorial. It's well written in a particular context, bring a point across as quickly and efficiently as possible, but it's written in a style which I don't enjoy at all. It's a purely functional, dry, uncompromising way of writing. It's a style that comes with risks and trade offs.
This type of writing might come off as treating the reader as a passive agent that needs to be educated. And the key in doing so is applying well known devices to achieve that goal as quickly and efficiently as possible. Push the right buttons and you'll be able to build the desired sentiment with your audience.
This shines through, for instance, in his second section - objectives - where his bullet points read as:
> Open people’s eyes by proving the status quo wrong.
> Identify key trends on a topic. Then use them to predict the future.
While this isn't inherently wrong, these are bold tactics that create huge expectations at the start of the article. As an author, you better make sure you can deliver on your promise when you go down that road. Worst case, you may come of as presumptuous, even pretentious, and lose a big chunk of your target audience, while the readers that stick likely already are part of the parish you're preaching to.
Writing only becomes better when you go on a journey of identifying your own intentions, and confronting your own trepidation. Why do you want to write? Who do you want to convince? Why do you want to convince them? What do you hope to achieve with your writing? What is your relationship with the reader and what defines your relationship with your readers? What is the importance to you, personally, in writing down your thoughts? What is it you want to express through your writing?
Answering these questions as you practice your writing will provide the building blocks you need to define your style, your tone of voice, the pace of your writing and so on.
Without a due amount of self reflection, authors might risk treating this type of writing into a golden hammer. Writing only becomes compelling if there's clear, genuine, personal investment in the content itself. Without it, "writing like Paul Graham or Derek Sivers" risks turning into a cargo cult like practice which produces boring, look-a-like writing.
The thing most novice writers don't do enough of is revision. If you don't know where to start, it's hard to go wrong cutting all your favorite parts and halving the word count.
Thanks for writing this, I've been struggling to write about fallacies in software verification for over a month now.
I realized that I wasn't writing for myself, or even folks who are likely to agree (mathematicians, logicians) with my viewpoint. I was writing to convince and justify, instead of examine, teach, or tell.
The kind of "clarity" presented here as good writing works well if you assume that everything that can be thought can be directly expressed in words, without substantial loss. This is clearly not the case. Language is a very poor medium to transmit throughts and feelings. So the "trick" every good writer uses is this: don't describe something directly, but instead try to construct some secondary clues, hints and a general atmosphere that will start a thought process in the reader's mind which leads to the conclusions you want to bring across. This is the poetic approach, it could also simply be called "writing between the lines".
In my experience, this approach is a much more effective transmitter of ideas than trying to describe them directly, also for the simple reason that the reader will subconsiously assume that it is his own idea.
You need beautiful prose, rhythm and images to achieve that, as those open up this additional dimension. The article undertakes considerable (even pedantic) effort to leave that dimension closed.
From quick googling it seems like I am not alone in my view of Wittgenstein as a poetic philosopher, see e.g.
https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019...
https://www.uib.no/en/news/101796/wittgenstein-poetic-philos...
He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.
Good HN comments are longer than tweets but shorter than essays, they strike a perfect balance of expressing an interesting idea in a reasonable time. And they always have an underlying, implicit amount of playful pedantry that makes them even more fun to read.
This very comment was fun to write because not even I know if I'm being sarcastic or not.
Comments in general are pseudo-dialog. Whereas in real life, we stumble over our words and can't edit, in well-policed comment sections with sincere posters, we can all contribute to a Sorkian drama.
It's not like anything he says is, by itself, that new or counterintuitive. But the whole talk, when fully digested, lets you view the world in an entirely different way.
The talk isn't about writing. It's not about science. Not about careers. It's about everything. The same thinking can be applied to speaking, to dating, to everything human.
What's in your head isn't intrinsically interesting to anyone except your mother. What value do you deliver? It's harsh. Harsh and cruel. It's not the cozy feel-good message you see everywhere nowadays. Maybe some would call the whole framing toxic. But would you rather taste the poison and then learn how to handle it, or would you stay ignorant and die of it (silently get ignored, nosedive your career, etc.).
In a masterfully meta way, the talk manages to deliver immense value.
He contrasted top-down with the bottom-up approach taught from elementary school to the undergraduate level which shows it as a superior approach to writing—if your goal is to introduce ideas that change the minds of your readers with your writing.
You can see the problem in the first two sentences of the article:
"To write well is to think clearly.
If you can think clearly, you can find something worth saying."
These are pleasant aphoristic paragragraphs, but what they say is not actually true. They gesture towards something true, but the drive to simplicity has turned potentially interesting points into falsehoods.
And the next sentence is both false and damaging. Good writing is most definitely not "therapy that you publish for the world to learn from".
(Plus, the writer should give balanced sentences a rest. They're useful to have in the rhetorical toolbox, but quickly become tedious when overused.)
Especially on LinkedIn.
These single sentence paragraphs.
Provocative.
At least that's what they think they are.
I find them annoying.
Trite.
Overdone.
In all seriousness: this article reads more like an outline than an actual piece of writing. Good writing is all about pacing. Some of your sentences should be long and winding. While others are short.
That variance in rhythm keeps your reader involved in the piece. It's not necessary to convey a point-information is just as easily digested in bullet-point form-but it's necessary if you want to maintain your audience's attention over time.
I still believe in short paragraphs; though not necessarily single-sentence ones. Paragraphs are meant to collect ideas, and it’s often a good practice to have a fairly “granular” approach, with “atomic,” self-contained “modules.”
The idea is to allow reading to proceed in a “piecemeal” fashion. This is due to the way people consume prose, these days, with sidebars and interruptions. It also lends itself well to reference reading.
In any case, a “wall of text” approach is disastrous in digital media. It works well, for justified paperbacks, but not so well on a digital device.
I hear this a lot, but it seems to me true only in a limited context. "Walls of text" are disastrous in marketing and some technical content, but these should not be the standard to which all writers aspire, even if they publish exclusively online.
For example, the London Review of Books[0] is famed for its long paragraphs, but they suit the topics and discursive, nuanced argument. Chopping them into smaller chunks would not make the arguments easier to follow for the educated readers who subscribe to the LRB.
[0]: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n23/james-butler/failed-...
> Ignore that advice.
:)
In this medium, a long paragraph of text may look less scannable to a reader, especially if they are on a mobile device. Hence the single setence paragraphs.
I don't prefer this style of writing either. I save to Pocket and read offline, so a standard essay-style layout works fine for me.
:)
Poor writers with substance can create compelling content.
Sometimes I want the cliff notes and sometimes I want to be enamored with some lovely prose that leads me somewhere and makes me think.
I'd also specifically recommend this talk by Larry McEnerney [1] which I discovered only recently in spite of actively looking for similar content - I guess I have a bias for written stuff.
[0] https://github.com/sixhobbits/technical-writing/blob/master/...
> That isn't to say children should understand your references and jargon. Do not over-simplify your language and weaken your ideas. Rather, children must be able to follow the logic of every argument.
Richard Feynman argues that people often hide between jargon to hide the fact that one doesn't know. As a programmer, I often see jargon as an additional dependency and only introduce it if I really cannot avoid it.
"This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety.
Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals—sounds that say listen to this, it is important.
So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. Don’t just write words. Write music."
Stripping a sentence to its cleanest components is a worthy aim but not at the cost of composition. Because, writers are part composers. In gmail, you're not prompted to 'write' an email. You're prompted to 'compose' it.
Brevity for its own sake isn't sustainable.
Wasted heading. What website doesn't welcome readers? An offline one.
> To write well is to think clearly.
No, it's to communicate well. There is beautifully-written nonsense.
> If you can think clearly, you can find something worth saying.
Meaninglessly asserts a relationship between two ambiguous thresholds. A vague thought not worth saying!
> An ideal place to start is thinking through what bothers you most in life.
No. That problem is likely too difficult. The correct essay topic is whatever thought won't go away until it's written down.
> The best writing is therapy that you publish for the world to learn from.
False: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books
That's where I stopped reading.
I know what Julian's trying to express. My Pubmind-T3 blogs are for publishing early and often, which is a best practice. But without Textmind (or David Allen's GTD), thinking in essays would be a frustratingly overloaded affordance.
Good writing, like clear thought, is reliably produced only via sound process.
https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/4dmufm/how_tech_writ...
[0] https://adamfaliq.wordpress.com/2020/10/28/write-well/
[1] https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/u.osu.edu/dist/5/7046/files/20...
The author pushes for a cold technical writing style. Then he brings up a bunch of literary writers? The two worlds are very much at odds.
The worship of the literary that's all too common in classrooms is, I believe, why so many people are scared of writing anything in the first place. And then there's the obsession with grammar.
Now do that every day at least once.
Congratulations. You're a writer.
[Edited because I read it out loud to myself and some parts sounded stupid]
Another thought that comes to my mind regarding writing is that why does one have to necessarily follow a particular set of rules?
Writing is an art. You should be able to develop and hone your own style, your own signature, something that stands apart from others, yet is readable and lucid.
I find rules are an excellent way to quickly get up to a reasonable level. One can discover these rules by trial and error, but this takes time and practice.
When one is comfortable working within these rules, they can then be broken for effect.
I think most great artists started as an apprentice, before becoming the master.
If you (or the author) disagree, then you have to explain what Jane Austen doesn’t understand that you do.
What style of icons and graphics are these? They seem hand drawn but I am wondering if stylistically there is a name so I can hunt down something similar or find more inspiration like this.
It's cheap, small (less than 70 pages.. don't remember exactly) and full of useful actionable tips.
I had just moved across the country after leaving my job at a newspaper. The job posting was for a copy editor at an in-house trade magazine at a Texas education nonprofit. They called me in for an interview, likely because I had copy editing experience on my resume.
Nothing unexpected happened. I talked to a few folks and the hiring manager, completed a copy editing exercise meant to test my competence at finding and addressing various spelling/grammar/AP style issues, and made my way back to the hiring manager before the final meeting with a few higher level executives.
The whole day went to shit when I found myself giving an honest answer to an off-hand question posed by the hiring manager. I heard myself talking about my fascination with writers, and especially those who made convincing and beautiful arguments while ignoring seemingly every rule and convention of the grammar and style books I had mastered in journalism school. As the words wound out of my brain through my mouth I knew there was no getting back to the promising path to a full-time copy editing job I had been on for the last few hours.
Based on our conversation thus far I knew this hiring manager was unlikely to be interested in my point of view, or in hiring me, now that the truth was out. A few minutes after we met she told me about how important the copy editor role was, especially since the educators who read the magazine tended to be sticklers when it came to matters of grammar and style. She knew this to be true because her first title at the company was, you guessed it, Copy Editor. It was as if I was running the final stages of a FAANG interview gauntlet, only to find myself loudly extolling the benefits of working for small startups.
She reacted as negatively as you would expect, and we moved on to the final portion of the day with the executives. By now I knew my job search would have to continue. The day wasn’t a total waste, however, because the CEO and founder of the nonprofit asked me the final question of the day.
“Is there anything else you want to know about me or the nonprofit I started before we wrap up?”
I knew there would be no job offer, so I decided to ask about something I was actually interested in knowing. I asked him if he had any regrets in his life, and told him I wanted to know because he was clearly successful and I rarely had the opportunity to ask about the pitfalls of success. He looked at me for a few moments and I wasn’t sure if I had managed to step in another pile of shit. When he finally responded it was to tell me slowly, then quickly, about the neglected relationships in his life, especially those with his children. We talked about the nature of family and friendships for a few minutes and I came away feeling much better about the whole situation.
I didn’t get the job (they gave it to a freshly minted English PhD) but I’ll never forget what I learned that day. Grammar and style don’t really matter, even when you’re interviewing for a job ostensibly concerned with nothing else. People and our connections absolutely do matter, and it’s those relationships by which we should judge our success in life.
