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Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well”

robinwieruch.de

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Re: Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well”

#21

Post by cgh »

x1798DE wrote: post #3

I was so disappointed with this book. Some of the platitudes Zinsser goes into are reasonable, like try to be uncluttered, direct and to the point, but all the worked examples seem to just be arbitrarily chosen to his taste. For example, in the chapter on "clutter", Zinsser picks out this passage from Walden as his exemplar of "uncluttered English": "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front…

I'm sure you've seen it before, but The Economist's style guide is my usual resource: http://www.economist.com/styleguide/introduction

Re: Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well”

#22

Post by m52go »

Plug: if want to write crisper, try my game, Worrd Warrior.

It's an online game gets you away from the stuffy platitudes of books and pits you against other writers to see who can get the message across best.

http://worrdwarrior.com

I haven't updated it in a little bit, but I'm preparing an update that will position it for competitions in local schools & companies, kind of like a spelling bee but actually useful.

Re: Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well”

#23

Post by karlb »

x1798DE wrote: post #3

I was so disappointed with this book. Some of the platitudes Zinsser goes into are reasonable, like try to be uncluttered, direct and to the point, but all the worked examples seem to just be arbitrarily chosen to his taste. For example, in the chapter on "clutter", Zinsser picks out this passage from Walden as his exemplar of "uncluttered English": "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front…

I agree. I struggled through Zinsser and didn't highlight much.

My colleagues and I have read over 50 books about writing and our 11 favorites are here: http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/writing/

In answer to your question, “Handbook of Technical Writing” by Alred et al is good, but I'd start with the first half of “Keys to Great Writing” by Stephen Wilbers, which deserves its Amazon rating of 4.8/5.0.

Re: Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well”

#24

Post by BaronSamedi »

x1798DE wrote: post #3

I was so disappointed with this book. Some of the platitudes Zinsser goes into are reasonable, like try to be uncluttered, direct and to the point, but all the worked examples seem to just be arbitrarily chosen to his taste. For example, in the chapter on "clutter", Zinsser picks out this passage from Walden as his exemplar of "uncluttered English": "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front…

The IBM book "Developing Quality Technical Information" is the best I've read on technical writing. For writing style, pickup any novel by Hemingway and copy it. You can also Google "how to write like Hemingway" for some easy to follow basic rules.

IMO, however, the biggest problem with most technical writing is not its style but rather the almost complete ignorance of what it should contain and how it should be structured. Open source documentation is a case in point. Some day I will get around to writing an article about documentation anti-patterns, or perhaps a book, given the abundance of examples.

Re: Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well”

#25

Post by BaronSamedi »

liangzan wrote: post #7

I've read "On Writing Well". I then discovered "Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace" by Joseph Williams. "Style" is better than "On Writing Well". "On Writing Well" opened my eyes to what bad writing is, while "Style" explained how to write clearly. He took an impossible topic - writing clearly, showing you the elements of clear, consistent and impactful writing, distilling down into actionable lessons. The advice…

I completely agree. "Style" is a great book--short and practical.

Re: Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well”

#26

Post by lacampbell »

x1798DE wrote: post #3

I was so disappointed with this book. Some of the platitudes Zinsser goes into are reasonable, like try to be uncluttered, direct and to the point, but all the worked examples seem to just be arbitrarily chosen to his taste. For example, in the chapter on "clutter", Zinsser picks out this passage from Walden as his exemplar of "uncluttered English": "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front…

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Dense, incredibly difficult to parse, with a non-standard use of "front" as a verb and what seems to be a triple-negative. If I said that sentence to you, out loud, I doubt you would catch the meaning of it on the first pass. The book is filled with stuff like that.

I don't think that's difficult for educated native English speakers. Walden was written in 1854, and most people who went to high school in an English speaking country would have some exposure to Shakespeare which is 250 years older than that - so I really don't think it's very archaic. Are you a non-native speaker? You write English completely fluently but if you've had no real exposure to the literature I can understand why you might find it hard going.

I haven't taken English since high school, and had no "liberal education" at university, and I did just fine with the audiobook (ie the whole thing was read aloud to me). I am not going to pretend it's easy to understand as modern, informal speech but it certainly wasn't arduous.

Re: Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well”

#27

Post by amelius »

EliRivers wrote: post #11
amelius wrote: post #6

> Imagine you start to write about a topic. Start to think small. “Decide on the corner of the subject you want to bite off.” Cover that corner well, be satisfied by that and stop. Make it a complete experience for your reader. Don’t nibble on another corner of the subject and leave the reader with an incomplete reading experience. Huh? Shouldn't you provide a birds-eye view of the topic first? Answer questions such…

"make it clear what issue you are going to discuss next" Please don't. Just get on with it. I routinely skip over anything that does this. Sometimes I have to flip through an entire opening chapter or introduction of a book to get past it. At least I can skip over it in the written word. When someone is delivering a presentation in the format of "tell them what you're going to tell them, then tell them, then tell the…

> "make it clear what issue you are going to discuss next"

> Please don't.

I would agree with you, but you removed "and why" from my sentence, which makes a big difference.

Consider a text about computing. Assume the first chapter discusses the binary number system. If not properly explained why this system is useful in computing, the reader would have a hard time understanding why they are reading about it.

Re: Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well”

#28

Post by cachvico »

There's an amusing number of simple grammatical mistakes in this article.. ("english", "It is unnecessary words that don’t add meaning but complex sentence constructions.", "Write about “grass” except when (my insert) it has another color than green", "Avoid semicolons except when (my insert) you want the reader to make a pause", ...)

Re: Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well”

#29

Post by x1798DE »

cgh wrote: post #21
x1798DE wrote: post #3

I was so disappointed with this book. Some of the platitudes Zinsser goes into are reasonable, like try to be uncluttered, direct and to the point, but all the worked examples seem to just be arbitrarily chosen to his taste. For example, in the chapter on "clutter", Zinsser picks out this passage from Walden as his exemplar of "uncluttered English": "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front…

I'm sure you've seen it before, but The Economist's style guide is my usual resource: http://www.economist.com/styleguide/introduction

This might not be so bad as a general guide to writing things like blog posts or whatever, but I'm specifically looking to get better at technical writing - e.g. writing software documentation. For example, the prohibition there on "jargon" words would probably come into conflict with the kind of precision you need in technical writing; I would expect the advice on something like that to be like, "where terms of art are required for the sake of precision, always make sure a definition is available, and link to it in hypertext formats" or "do not overload jargon words".

Don't get me wrong, it's not like there's no overlap, but I'm looking for the equivalent of "Clean Code" for technical writing.

Re: Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well”

#30

Post by aggie »

cachvico wrote: post #28

There's an amusing number of simple grammatical mistakes in this article.. ("english", "It is unnecessary words that don’t add meaning but complex sentence constructions.", "Write about “grass” except when (my insert) it has another color than green", "Avoid semicolons except when (my insert) you want the reader to make a pause", ...)

In all but one of those examples you're calling out technical errors that don't have much impact on communication.

It seems most HN threads about writing advice have a post nit-picking the article for grammar. I don't see how this is interesting if you don't want to actually make the case that it hurts the author's credibility. Do you?

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