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The Guide to Writing Online

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Re: The Guide to Writing Online

#41

Post by impostir »

camillomiller wrote: post #2

Quick guide to Americans writing for a European public (or who want to make business with Europe, especially Germany). Writing something like this: >“I’ve interviewed more than 70 of the world’s most interesting people on my North Star Podcast, built a weekly email newsletter with almost 10,000 subscribers, and my most popular articles, such as What the Hell is Going On?, have been read more than 100,000 times. I’ve…

I'm an American and I completely agree, but I think some context might be useful. Americans are trained from a young age that you have to sell yourself. You need to toot your own horn because no one else will. It is a component of the hustler culture in America. You always need to be fighting for the smallest advantage and overselling is a popular mechanism. Its incredibly dehumanizing, but thats never stopped America before.

Re: The Guide to Writing Online

#42

Post by jfk13 »

impostir wrote: post #41
camillomiller wrote: post #2

Quick guide to Americans writing for a European public (or who want to make business with Europe, especially Germany). Writing something like this: >“I’ve interviewed more than 70 of the world’s most interesting people on my North Star Podcast, built a weekly email newsletter with almost 10,000 subscribers, and my most popular articles, such as What the Hell is Going On?, have been read more than 100,000 times. I’ve…

I'm an American and I completely agree, but I think some context might be useful. Americans are trained from a young age that you have to sell yourself. You need to toot your own horn because no one else will. It is a component of the hustler culture in America. You always need to be fighting for the smallest advantage and overselling is a popular mechanism. Its incredibly dehumanizing, but thats never stopped Americ…

Thank you. As a European who has spent a lot of time in America (and is married to an American, even), I appreciate you recognising and articulating this.

Re: The Guide to Writing Online

#43

Post by jfk13 »

stakodiak wrote: post #39
keerthiko wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's exclusive to non-American, ie, doing this "always marketing yourself" thing whenever you talk or write or communicate in any way is kinda exclusive to Americans (as being acceptable and normal). The "sell yourself" culture is pretty deeply ingrained in this country in almost all personal communication, except with very close and trusted friends, and even then you'll often find inclinations to sell themselves soc…

I think your armchair anthropology ignores the diversity of speakers and cultures in the United States. Could you share more about your methodology? Also, the OP _is_ selling something. If you opened your eyelids slightly, you could see his mentioning of an online ‘course.’ This article is itself “content marketing” so the OP is likely fishing for customers from this HN post.

Checking OP's posting history, it appears to be all his own articles/blog posts/whatever. Yep, shameless self-promoting spammer. That's enough to guarantee I will not be reading (let alone purchasing) anything from him.

Re: The Guide to Writing Online

#44

Post by lubujackson »

camillomiller wrote: post #2

Quick guide to Americans writing for a European public (or who want to make business with Europe, especially Germany). Writing something like this: >“I’ve interviewed more than 70 of the world’s most interesting people on my North Star Podcast, built a weekly email newsletter with almost 10,000 subscribers, and my most popular articles, such as What the Hell is Going On?, have been read more than 100,000 times. I’ve…

This is the online trend of marketing eating itself, where they sell the I'M ACCOMPLISHED, IT'S EASY is followed by YOU CAN DO IT TO followed by a couple minor points of interest so it feels substantial, then a long-winded rehash how important everything is and how capable you are of doing it, and oh look there happens to be an intensive course for learning all of this but if you REALLY want to be a superstar marketer there is an ultra-special course...

It's kind of like a pyramid scheme of skills/accomplishments where every person in the system is spending all their energy teaching everyone else how to sell their skills and accomplishments as the first step without anyone actually saying or doing anything of value. I would say Tony Robbins is the kingpin of this, where he has built a career out of successfully telling people how they can be just like Tony Robbins with just a sprinkle of substance to make it feel like a meal.

Re: The Guide to Writing Online

#45

Post by bthallplz »

> "As Devon Zuegel said in my interview with her, writing falls into three buckets: (1) trivial things that everybody knows, (2) things that everybody knows, [but nobody around you knows], and you have a unique perspective on, and (3) stuff that nobody knows so you have to do tons of research. Direct your energy towards the second bucket.”

Amusingly, this leaves out things that nobody knows but desperately wants to know, among other potential things.

Re: The Guide to Writing Online

#46

Post by Viliam1234 »

friggeri wrote: post #3

One of the things I've been struggling with is that once I've mastered a topic enough to feel comfortable writing about it, everything I write sounds obvious to me, and from there there is an easy leap to "it's probably obvious to everyone", and I start questioning whether I should write at all. Anyone has dealt with this? Tips would be appreciated.

Even worse, there will be exactly one person to whom your text also sounds obvious (rightfully [or not](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)), and that person will leave a long angry comment.

The key is to accept that whatever is your topic and however you write it, someone will be disappointed because it is too simple, someone will be disappointed because it is too complex, someone will not understand the article because they miss some of the prerequisites, and someone will get angry because you spend too much time explaining the prerequisites.

People are different, you can't make everyone happy. The unhappy people are more likely to give feedback than the happy ones. (You probably wonder why other writers have tons of positive feedback. They likely paid for it. Or it is link spam: "your article is so awesome and inspiring; now here is a link to my completely unrelated web page".)

I guess you just have to imagine the target audience, and keep writing for them. First you get both positive and negative comments, which is okay, because the people who didn't like the first part should stop reading. If they keep reading your N-th article and posting the same angry comments, they are idiots; ban them and erase their comments. (There is a difference between pointing out a mistake, which is a good thing, and posting "this is noob stuff, loser" under ten articles in a row, which is bullying.)

Re: The Guide to Writing Online

#47

Post by bemmu »

friggeri wrote: post #3

One of the things I've been struggling with is that once I've mastered a topic enough to feel comfortable writing about it, everything I write sounds obvious to me, and from there there is an easy leap to "it's probably obvious to everyone", and I start questioning whether I should write at all. Anyone has dealt with this? Tips would be appreciated.

Any time I learn anything new it's never "wow, now I am smart", but always "ohh... I can't believe everyone but me has known this thing all this time".

Re: The Guide to Writing Online

#48

Post by Noumenon72 »

sridca wrote: post #33
Toine wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

European here, you nailed it. I stopped reading because of this, unfortunately. Americans, why does everything have to sound like a cheap TV commercial from the 90s ?

Neither an European nor an American here (born in India actually), and I too stopped reading for the same reason.

I hadn't even started reading at that point. By the third sentence I was skimming. I slowed down at the heading "Age of Leverage" but didn't start actually reading till the bullet points

1. A Start Here page

2. A curated list of your favorite articles

At that point I thought the advice on bootstrapping a blog was quite worthwhile. I think the reading strategy of rejecting articles that start slow is not as good as skimming over what isn't interesting to get to what is.

Re: The Guide to Writing Online

#49

Post by knight17 »

mikro2nd wrote: post #12

I confess to having my confidence in the writer shaken when I read, "That’s when they’ll pour through the archives". No, they won't. They might pore through your archives, though. Offering a course in "Online Writing" and then making such a basic usage error did not inspire much confidence. Perhaps another pair of editorial eyes might help? For any writer (myself especially included!) editors and proofreaders are you…

Here is another one I noticed—'unphased' is used instead of 'unfazed'.

>Unphased, Nick kept publishing.

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