Write like you talk

  Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say)

Writing for the audience is secondary to writing[1]. Graham's good at it after 25 years developing his writing and cultivating an audiance.

Everything else is secondary to this when it comes to getting people to read what I've written. The first writing I did that I thought was any good was on Critique of Pure Reason and I wrote that paper in the style of translated Kant, which is to say that there were a lot of "which is to say that" which is to say that "which is to say that" is not something I normally say in everyday conversation, but that I find very helpful when I'm trying to explain something complicated (and generalizes to a useful strategy at the end of meetings to help insure that everybody talked about some of the same things and hopefully it was the same things that were important).

And reading Kant shows that sometimes reading is hard work and that some people enjoy it, and bringing pleasure into the world by writing is possible. These days I sort of look to do that since why else would I write? Besides as a way of thinking, of course.

I guess that means that perhaps Matz is on to something, write what makes you happy. It sort of goes without saying that being nice is part of that and I've come to realize that the part of being an internet asshole that was pleasurable was the writing part and the part of that that was at the core of being happy was writing effectively.

Now for some kinds of writing, being effective means using short blunt sentences in the Hemmingway style. But fuck the man shot himself in the head, and Shakespeare and Faulkner didn't. Not that it's statistical proof that writing that way made him unhappy, but it obviously didn't make him happy enough if it even made him happy at all.

Of course, I'm not PG, so people don't expect the sage advice about startups; a good thing since his advice is really good. I'm just not sure his advice to beginning authors is particularly sage since the works from his early career as an author have the same "clam ice cream with reluctance" cleverness for the sake of being clever that impedes simplicity but gives authors the joy of playing with words that keeps them going forward like the nine iron over the tree from the deep rough that sticks close to the hole brings bad duffers back for more misery.

In other words, there's something to be said for stream of consciousness writing and against being self conscious. Writing is a soliloquy, it's a speech not a conversation: a sermon for the choir with only the hope that people won't walk out as the level of attention that should be paid to the non-audience.

For what it's worth, I had fun writing this, typos and all. I hope someone had fun reading it. I also enjoy Graham's essays and books. I'd just simplify this one.

[1]: http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/sld001.htm

    > This work aims to address the disconnect between object-oriented design
    > and implementation by rethinking the way object-oriented languages are
    > structured. We have developed a set of requirements with which to identify
    > good relationship models, and used these requirements to develop a
    > new model for the object-oriented paradigm which focuses on relationships
    > rather than objects. We will test the effectiveness of the model by designing
    > a language which uses it, along with a formal specification and a
    > practical implementation for the language. We will measure the effectiveness
    > of our model by conducting case studies comparing development in
    > existing languages with development in our relationship-based language.

    > The tide climbs. The moon hangs small and yellow and gibbous. On the rooftops
    > of beachfront hotels to the east, and in the gardens behind them, a half-dozen
    > American artillery units drop incendiary rounds into the mouths of mortars.

The key part is not to write like you are speaking to your friends. It's to write like you are speaking to a specific audience. Have a picture in your mind of yourself speaking in a venue to one or more people. The image you have will dramatically affect the way you right.

Picture yourself giving a hollering a rousing speech to a platoon of soldiers about to enter into battle and your reader will hear the Battle Hymn of the Republic by the time they reach the end of your paragraph. Whisper your words into the ear of a lover and your reader will get the shivers.

For most of the writing we on HN do, sure, "explaining something cool to your friends over lunch" is exactly the right image to get your style in line. But it's a massive over-simplification to say all prose should be written with tat venue in mind.

Personally, I think "mercurial Spaniard" is a great description of Picasso.