Instead of this random collection of rules, I prefer Larry McEnerney’s lecture The Craft of Writing Effectively : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM
Thanks, just started watching it. Interesting.
Common bugs in writing (2021)
91–99 of 99 posts
Re: Common bugs in writing (2021)
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> His basic advice was to follow the classic Hero's Tale. Set the stage. Something goes wrong. You triumphantly overcome it. Ie “STAR format”
Kind of, but STAR is boring and there's generally no emotional journey. You just start with the problem and then it's immediately solved.
In the hero's tale it kind of starts of happy and then something goes wrong. STAR misses out half of the story. It's like if Shrek started just before the wedding with a narrative explanation of the problem Shrek was trying to solve.
Re: Common bugs in writing (2021)
#93Earlier 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…
> But they don't have a table of contents at the start that people tediously read and then exactly the same thing again at the end.
I think tables of content are great for live presentations, especially if your slides have some indicator where we are currently. It's just too easy to get lost or slide away, especially in engaging and thought provoking presentations. That way I can get back to where we are, where we come from and where we're headed.
But I agree that it's super annoying to actually present that stuff multiple times. It should be a navigational device, not content.
Re: Common bugs in writing (2021)
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> When I was doing my PhD What field, if I may ask? There's an article titled "Writing higher education differently: a manifesto on style" by Helen Sword http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075070802597101 > advocating for academic writers to "express complex ideas clearly and succinctly; write with originality, imagination and creative flair; convey enthusiasm, commitment and a strong sense of self; tap into a wide range of…
> What field, if I may ask? It was in CS actually. So writing in social sciences doesn’t seem too appropriate. Thanks for the other hint though. Seems quite interesting and seems similar to: How to write a great research paper [1] [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WP-FkUaOcOM
> writing in social sciences doesn’t seem too appropriate.
I'm disappointed. I specifically mentioned how the book is applicable across academic fields, because I suspected the typical HN poster would be in sci/tech and would have a bias against the social sciences. Sometimes I hate being proven correct.
Re: Common bugs in writing (2021)
#95Re: Common bugs in writing (2021)
#96One of my pet peeves is when the writer uses a pronoun immediately after a sentence with multiple proper nouns. For example, something like "Biden ran against Trump in 2020, and he raised a lot of money".
Or, "the packet is sent from the client to the server, and it ...." I see this a lot in technical writing where the writer is explaining a flow of code or data, and is very well aware of the antecedent of it - but the reader now has to guess, read ahead, perhaps discover they were wrong, revert their mental model, and make a different guess. JRY - Just repeat yourself. Be unambiguous. Use whatever word would have bee…
another pet peeve I have is double or even triple negatives used casually. Newspapers like the NYTimes or Wall street journal are very guilty of this. For example: "The congressman voted down a bill banning opposition to Foo".
Of course, this statement is factual, but it's extremely difficult to tell whether the congressman is in favor of Foo or not. Simply contracting the sentence to "The congressman (doesn't?) like Foo" loses info.
I think the proper solution here is for the newspaper to have the original confusing sentence, but also add a second sentence with the contraction as a hint. For example:
"The congressman voted down a bill banning opposition to Foo. He did this because he is in favor of Foo."
Re: Common bugs in writing (2021)
#97> ... 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'.
In the past decade I saw a lot of overcorrection where it-possessive is mistakenly written as "it's" instead of "its".
Re: Common bugs in writing (2021)
#98To nitpick the nitpicky article, it was “OS X”, not “OSX”.
And that naming is obsolete since macOS 10.12 (year 2016). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_Sierra
Re: Common bugs in writing (2021)
#99>14. Use until instead of the colloquial till. I remember reading somewhere that "till" is actually older then "until", and that they are perfectly interchangeable, although I do see "until" way more often than the other.
I prefer ‘til personally, makes it a bit more explicit what word you’re using.