Instead of this random collection of rules, I prefer Larry McEnerney’s lecture The Craft of Writing Effectively:
Common bugs in writing (2021)
71–80 of 99 posts
Re: Common bugs in writing (2021)
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a good rule for general information presentation. Tell them what you are going to tell them. Tell them what you want to tell them. Tell them what you just told them.
Ugh that "rule" has resulted in more terrible PowerPoint presentations than any other. "Hi, today I'm going to tell you about 1+1... 1+1=2... So what have we talked about? I started by telling you that 1+1=2." So much waffle. The best presentations I've heard don't do that at all. Yes they start by setting the context and goal of the presentation , and they end with a solid conclusion . But they don't have a table of…
Replace boring "context" with "showing why your writings and information will be valuable to the reader" and I think you've got something.
Re: Common bugs in writing (2021)
#73One extremely common bug even among good writers - saying "Jack was in his 30th year" to mean "Jack was 30" (and so should be in his 31st year). At least, I think of this as a bug, but perhaps it is accepted by general convention? I have not seen any discussion of it.
Re: Common bugs in writing (2021)
#74I'm a little perplexed as to why professors and other academic staff have routinely hard to read websites. Yes I'm aware I can bump up the font size, but especially on mobile that gets annoying. It's one thing if they don't have a stylesheet what so ever, it's a fully another thing to intentionally make things hard to read: font-family: arial,verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small; From an article that expressly advoca…
Those who don't know...
Re: Common bugs in writing (2021)
#75Could I just give this page to chatgpt and feed paragraph by paragraph my report and get it to be the most outstanding writing that has ever been
Re: Common bugs in writing (2021)
#76> If you find yourself saying "In other words," it means you didn't say it clearly enough the first time. Go back and rewrite the first attempt. Sometimes, particularly in didactic material, it helps to explain things in more than one way, as different people may find different explanations helpful.
Further down (39) there is a suggestion that you start a paragraph with a summary sentence. That might help cover this.
‘Each paragraph should have a lead sentence summarizing its content. If this doesn't work naturally, the paragraph is probably too short.’
Re: Common bugs in writing (2021)
#77I'm a little perplexed as to why professors and other academic staff have routinely hard to read websites. Yes I'm aware I can bump up the font size, but especially on mobile that gets annoying. It's one thing if they don't have a stylesheet what so ever, it's a fully another thing to intentionally make things hard to read: font-family: arial,verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small; From an article that expressly advoca…
Because they have better things to do than tinkering with the latest HTML technology.
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Re: Common bugs in writing (2021)
#78> ... work out what you wanted to say, even if its a whole paper. A very common bug in writing is misspelling the contraction of 'it is' as 'its'.
… another I see a lot is alot.
Re: Common bugs in writing (2021)
#79This suffers from a pathology common to writing style guides: it starts with strong, reasonably universal advice, and descends into a subjective catalog of the author's pet peeves. There's no utility in advising technical writers not to begin sentences with the word "and".
Especially if the preceding sentence is always true.
Re: Common bugs in writing (2021)
#80This is a style guide for work done in CS at Columbia. Sometimes there are more than one way to do something and you just have to make a choice. Whatever choice you make, it should be documented. That documentation is called a style guide. This is that document for this group.
This might ease tensions among those who disagree with these choices or with prescriptive rules for writing in general.