You just gotta tell a good story

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk » Tue, Mar 07, 2023, 6:49 AM UTC

nerdponx wrote: post #18

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #7

Aside: Was that blog post taken from Twitter? If not, Twitter has profoundly affected the way the author writes. Nearly every "paragraph" is a single sentence, and the longest of them is just 300 characters. I imagine it must be difficult to tell a story if you write it in a style where your paragraphs resemble bullet points! Perhaps, though, it might work if it's very dialog-heavy, and if the characters are noir-lac…

> Twitter has profoundly affected the way the author writes. This is wild speculation. Newspaper journalism has always tended toward paragraphs of one or two short sentences at most. It's a stylistic choice born partly out of the physical constraints of newspaper layouts, but it also makes articles easy to skim, and the information density tends to be high. This style has always been shared with news articles online,…

Post by feoren » Tue, Mar 07, 2023, 6:52 AM UTC

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #7

Aside: Was that blog post taken from Twitter? If not, Twitter has profoundly affected the way the author writes. Nearly every "paragraph" is a single sentence, and the longest of them is just 300 characters. I imagine it must be difficult to tell a story if you write it in a style where your paragraphs resemble bullet points! Perhaps, though, it might work if it's very dialog-heavy, and if the characters are noir-lac…

Post by mwcremer » Tue, Mar 07, 2023, 7:34 AM UTC

yesenadam wrote: post #31

throwaway14356 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

imho that story should have ended like: "I didn't say that" - Plato

It's been done to death already. e.g. https://www.redbubble.com/i/art-board-print/Plato-I-Didn-t-S... Some variants: Einstein https://innovativewealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Eins... Lincoln https://innovativewealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/quot... Buddha https://superaalifragilistic.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/new...

Post by namaria » Tue, Mar 07, 2023, 8:20 AM UTC

feoren wrote: post #38

waprin wrote: post #14

The other day I was aimlessly browsing through Youtube, and I found a video by a man named Ira Glass. I had never heard of him but apparently he's a famous NPR journalist. He told a story about how in English class he learned to start with a theses and then explain facts. But, in broadcasting, he learned that doesn't work. Instead, you start with an anecdote - the purest form of a story. Ira pointed out that humans a…

I hate that this style is shoehorned into absolutely everything, though. I can barely stand to read most nonfiction books anymore, even highly regarded ones about subjects I'm interested in. The part of my brain that likes a good story is very different than the one that's ready to refine my model of the universe, and it's jarring to have Malcom Gladwell artificially stitching together unrelated events, people, and i…

Post by fwlr » Tue, Mar 07, 2023, 8:45 AM UTC

Hackbraten wrote: post #44

fwlr wrote: post #16

This post’s writing markedly improved right when it started talking about teaching board games and dropped right when it stopped. I think it’s because the author’s passion for this anecdote about teaching board games distracted them from consciously applying that peculiar staccato style. I don’t know the reason for the staccato style. Self-imposed onto their content because it’s good for engagement? A technique for g…

> The linguistic analogue of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, brought on by repeated Twitter concussions? Not sure if you did that on purpose, but your comment just blew my mind. Concussion as in “total absence of discussion.” Love it!