Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tersing proliferates.
Somewhat
STOP!
How to Write Usefully
191–200 of 308 posts
Re: How to Write Usefully
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you be kind enough to share any links to your own writing and some of the key factors that improved it. I wish to improve my communication and appreciate that Paul Graham thought hard then freely shared his insights on such a difficult topic for a great deal of people. I've always wondered how and why Geoff Bezos ran Amazon with six page essays and now I think I'm a bit closer to understanding.
Do you also ask cinema critics to show their own movies, food critics to provide their own food, etc.? One does not necessarily need to be able to _make_ something to be able to _tell_ whether something is good or not.
I agree.
In hindsight you are completely right. My immediate reaction to the essay was I thought it was a brilliant resource. My gut feeling was that criticism of an educational author's writing on the topic of useful essay writing without stating the why wasn't useful.
Asking for the critics own writing was a cheap shot and it was wrong. Sorry OP.
In hindsight I should have said
"That's an interesting insight would you mind sharing some better educational resources on writing a useful essay."
If I'd lent greater attention to the essay than its comments, I would have.
Re: How to Write Usefully
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. People often confuse understanding audience with verbosity. Waffling and context both add word count. edit: I could reduce this to "Waffling and context both add word count." but then: 1: It's not clear I agree with you and 2: Triplets--like the three sentences I wrote there--are an artistic device that improve clarity and help prose flow.
There's a large international audience here. So, slang like "yep" should probably be avoided if one is keen to carefully tailor their writing? (I debated whether to use 'one' or 'someone' here, for similar reasons.)
It never occurred to me that it was American slang. That's a new thing to think about.
Re: How to Write Usefully
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
It simply isn't true though, they are rarely required together. His example of the location of a city could have been replaced with gps co-ordinates in the place of a descriptive phrase. NASA deals with strength and precision together all the time, it's rare that they are both needed on the same task at the same level. The requirements for precision and strength to be shared in an essay is to construct sentences that…
Reading random GPS coordinates in an essay without a map in a has high precision but terrible understanding. While it's highly accurate, it's almost useless to the typical reader who would have difficulty knowing that the GPS coordinate is within Colorado. GPS coordinates are for maps not essays.
I agree. The context of your essay would make clear both whether you need that much precision and what format to use for the precision.
Three miles east of the center of South Carolina is almost accurate enough? Who knows, not accurate enough for NASA and accurate enough for giving coworkers the idea of where your farmland is located.
Re: How to Write Usefully
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Roald Dahl's work is some of the most delightfully readable and engaging writing out there in my humble opinion and that was written nearly one hundred years ago in the 1930s and 1940s. Good writing is timeless, I may suggest that adding hyperlinks under a new word you introduced inside your essay that requires clicking on and reading a wholly different story to understand the current story you are reading, is a terr…
I think there is plenty of good and great writing that isn't timeless. Especially when it comes to essays, where the nature of what we know and care about changes so dramatically. An essay written to convince a slaver of the moral errors of slavery may seem so obvious to the modern reader as to be condescending, but, effective in it's time period, it was great writing.
True the content of the stories fade in and out of relevance and greatness.
The structuring of essays improves and dips in transcendent quality over time depending on the behaviour of authors at large and human understanding of communication through essay. The virtue and successful execution of well structured essays is timeless. RD's work is well structured. It's possible to learn and execute on structures that are proven to work across time and speak for themselves in the results.
Re: How to Write Usefully
#196As a counterpoint, I'd argue that the "mathematical" approach to good writing is inherently flawed. That is, trying to arrive at the formula for the "best" essay via dialectic (argument) is to miss the forest for the trees. Writing is an art, not a science. Formal logic was developed to display arguments, so if you are trying to be as precise and mathematical as possible, use that instead. Instead, I'd suggest readin…
I think the fallacy is in the premise: "An essay should be useful." Well, useful is always in the eye of the beholder. There is no such thing as an absolute truth, after all. And pretending there is, and it's even attainable, is intellectually dishonest. Sure, an essay could be a formal piece that approaches an almost "mathematical" approach. After all, an essay a first and foremost an argument presented by the autho…
Generally, I agree with what you are saying about essays and stating that "they should be useful."
But I was surprised by your comments about truth:
> There is no such thing as an absolute truth, after all. And pretending there is, and it's even attainable, is intellectually dishonest.
Could you expand on what you mean by "an absolute truth?"
I may be misunderstanding you, but I suspect you mean that we can never know anything with absolute certainty. For example, it may _seem_ that I typing on a keyboard, but in actual fact, I am dreaming.
In this example, there _is_ an absolute truth. I am typing on my keyboard, or I am not. But that truth is not knowable without any doubt.
If we use "truth" as high as knowing without any possible doubt, then nothing is "true." Thus, the word true is useless during everyday communication. For this reason I don't think it is appropriate to qualify everything we say with, "we don't know with absolute certainty this is true, but here is my best guess." Rather, we just say it is true.
Re: How to Write Usefully
#197This reads like a list of bullet points the author dreamed up that morning. I can feel the morning coffee and feigned interest in communicating to the anonymous internet as the self-interested writer taps a pen on his computer screen. A better way for this writer to succeed would have been to wrap his list of "rules" around a problem for a character, institution or team of people. Placing these imagined rules in stor…
Is this comment satire?
>> I can feel the morning coffee and feigned interest
PG admits he rereads some of his sentences up to 100 times in his revision process in the very piece you criticize.
>>The author could put down his morning coffee and instead describe part of the story to his wife or secretary and see the reaction of someone outside the field responding to what could be an interesting topic.
His writing also addresses this in the same writing, advising people to specialize with a target audience... Did you read this piece?
This is either funny trolling (giving condescending essay advice to one of the most succesful essayists of our era, on the platform he created), or woefully lazy.
Re: How to Write Usefully
#198Re: How to Write Usefully
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn’t normally take apart an HN comment on grammar, but you are commenting on clarity of writing. If this is something you care about, than the following proofing may be useful. Format is (delete text)[insert text or comment]. ——————— That’s because you have very (few exposition)[little exposure] to (1890 writing)[writing from 1890]. When I read published (book)[books;otherwise “often” in next segment doesn’t ma…
He said he read something in French, so the obvious assumption is that he's French (or French Canadian). Being a grammar Nazi about what one can assume is a non-native English speaker's grammar is just plain 'ol dumb.
I don't think they were being mean. To me that should have been a PM, but we don't have those here.
Re: How to Write Usefully
#200This reads like a list of bullet points the author dreamed up that morning. I can feel the morning coffee and feigned interest in communicating to the anonymous internet as the self-interested writer taps a pen on his computer screen. A better way for this writer to succeed would have been to wrap his list of "rules" around a problem for a character, institution or team of people. Placing these imagined rules in stor…
Is this comment satire? >> I can feel the morning coffee and feigned interest PG admits he rereads some of his sentences up to 100 times in his revision process in the very piece you criticize. >>The author could put down his morning coffee and instead describe part of the story to his wife or secretary and see the reaction of someone outside the field responding to what could be an interesting topic. His writing als…
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