331–340 of 354 posts
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Many a “writer’s” audience is a majority their mother. Sure, producers and consumers “find each other” but that’s no where near the end of the story. You have a flaw in your reasoning here. Not all that is true is falsifiable.
I saw a writing tip on Twitter the other day that said write like your parent are already dead, which is another way of saying write with less inner critic
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Reducing language to a mere communication tool also destroys much of its beauty, meaning, and ability to inspire or motivate us. I don't think it's a coincidence that the loss of interest in poetry has coincided with a general loss of respect for literary culture. That's not the argument here. This talks about language and writing as a means of communicating ideas to as broad an audience as possible. There is still…
There's two things wrong with this. First taking as self-evident the notion that plain or simple language is necessarily more effective in communicating ideas to a broad audience. That's very questionable. Effective orators don't just communicate simply to 'move ideas around', they also inspire and connect emotionally with their audience, just think of any well-regarded and successful politician. Secondly implicit in…
Here's the context for my argument: believe it or not, there are people that will use language to impress or intimidate or to even mask their ignorance, even people who also purport to communicate ideas. Sometimes those people will also purposely use jargon with the aim to do both: direct their message to their in-group and purposely exclude individuals not from their in-group (I can list some examples of groups that do that, but I prefer not to go down that rabbit hole. I'm sure you can come up with some examples as well).
On the other hand, people who genuinely care about communicating ideas as broadly as possible will tailor their speech in such a way as to make it most accessible to as much of the audience as possible, because to them the idea is the important part not the medium. I leave it up to you to define 'accessible speech', but to pg it means communicating with simpler language - I think he makes a reasonable argument. Especially in context of a multicultural society with a sizable (recent) immigrant base and a global audience with various levels of English vocabulary knowledge.
It is also the hallmark of a good teacher when they can tailor the idea to a student who is smart enough to understand it but struggles with overcoming some kind of barrier (from vocabulary, to culture)
I have opinions about writing. So does Mr. Graham. What our opinions have in common is that they are not falsifiable . Unless we validate our conjectures with empirical evidence, we're really just sharing our taste. "Oh no," you may say, "I have tested it, and when I write a longer essay, my retweets and upvotes decline." Very well, but the plural of anecdote is not 'data.' Somewhere else on the Internet, there is so…
There is no empirical evidence that can "validate" a normative claim, except to the extent that such claims rely on empirical priors. You can't squeeze an "ought" from an "is," literally by definition. The response "this normative opinion is not falsifiable" is just confused—it's like saying "this empirical observation is not good."
I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences. ... That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it.
This is a claim suggesting a cause-and-effect relationship between a certain type of writing and a certain behaviour on the part of people who read the article.
My feeling is that this claim could be falsifiable, provided the OP got specific about what "ordinary words" are, what "simple sentences" are, and what kind of "engagement" we wish to measure.
If he did so, the claim would be falsifiable. And in truth, I'm not going to say that if he did get precise, it would still not be falsifiable. Experience tells me that yes, we can identify cause-and-effect relationships between empirically measurable characteristics of prose and precise engagement metrics.
That is exactly the kind of thing that people do when they try to manufacture "clickbait" headlines.
But he chose to make these claims without being specific, and to me this is what makes it non-falsifiable, but not normative.
JM2C.
To write simply, in the way that Paul suggests here, and in the way most editorial softwares these days try to suggest/auto-correct our writings (gmail, grammarly, hemingway app etc).
That is until I found a guy called Alexander Cortes, a personal trainer selling fitness programs online.
His writing style and the philosophy behind is the exact opposite of the ideas above.
When I subscribed to his newsletter (read by many thousands) I was impressed with his style. It has typos, no punctuation and no writing order/rules of any kind that you might've got used to. But you can still read and fully comprehend it. Otherwise that many people wouldn't be following him (100K twitter followers: @AJA_Cortes). It's unique and makes his writing stand out from all the writers following same writing advice from the mainstream writing advice (which is similar to what Paul says in the article).
In this tweet thread Alexnder talks about his writing style [1]. Here's two posts from his blog [2] and [3] that I like and shows the style.
[1] https://twitter.com/AJA_Cortes/status/1250356145316712449 [2] https://cortes.site/the-protocol-for-rehabbing-a-bad-shoulde... [3] https://cortes.site/the-tao-of-bro/
I too thought this was the better way to write. To write simply, in the way that Paul suggests here, and in the way most editorial softwares these days try to suggest/auto-correct our writings (gmail, grammarly, hemingway app etc). That is until I found a guy called Alexander Cortes, a personal trainer selling fitness programs online. His writing style and the philosophy behind is the exact opposite of the ideas abov…
I think there are two sources of confirmation bias here: 1. People on HN are already primed to appreciate this style of writing. Simple. Precise. Direct. It suits a technical literal mind to have less ambiguity and fewer flourishes. 2. On the web, where each individual piece of writing is not meant to last as long, the writing style has become more casual. Consider the difference between your average Medium article v…
>People on HN are already primed to appreciate this style of writing. My perception is the reverse. Probably 60% of the articles linked on this site, day in and day out, are a thicket of impenetrable jargon. Endless blog posts that make no attempt to explain to the non-initiated what the various acronyms mean or why the concepts might matter for a person who is not deeply, deeply immersed in whatever technical field…
Insightful ideas are rare. Hiding mundane thoughts in abstruse verbiage leaves questions in the mind of the readership: "I don't see the author's point. But he seems pretty smart. I must have missed something." Vote up.
Many well established schools of untestable academic thought are often built on foundations as sandy as these, IMHO.
I think there are two sources of confirmation bias here: 1. People on HN are already primed to appreciate this style of writing. Simple. Precise. Direct. It suits a technical literal mind to have less ambiguity and fewer flourishes. 2. On the web, where each individual piece of writing is not meant to last as long, the writing style has become more casual. Consider the difference between your average Medium article v…
I have opinions about writing. So does Mr. Graham. What our opinions have in common is that they are not falsifiable . Unless we validate our conjectures with empirical evidence, we're really just sharing our taste. "Oh no," you may say, "I have tested it, and when I write a longer essay, my retweets and upvotes decline." Very well, but the plural of anecdote is not 'data.' Somewhere else on the Internet, there is so…
I wish there was an A/B testing platform for writers
For grins I pasted PG's text into the demo readability tool at https://app.readable.com/text/?demo >. 'Write Simply' received an overall grade of 'A', and a very-approachable Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of 5.9. It's said to be readable by 100% of the literate general public, which is only 85% of the full general public. But, out of the 507 words and 38 sentences, 4 sentences were flagged as "very long" (over 30 syllab…