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> Let me explain what I mean.
It turns out that if you're writing an essay or a youtube script you don't have to tell me that you're going to explain something to me before you explain it to me. I guess it acts as a "hack" to try to impart some gravity to what follows without actually having to write a convincing introduction, but unlike "it turns out" it can almost always just be deleted to improve the flow.
Check the YouTube video Plagiarism and You(Tube) from hbomberguy where he addresses his infatuation with this phrase I turns out that it's also a phrase which gets stuck on some peoples mind easily
> But it turns out writing a good review is really difficult. For example, I use the phrase "it turns out" more than once every video by accident because I'm bad at it. I'm not even joking. I've written "it turns out" in the next section without realizing it. That's how fuckin' bad I am.
> Being able to write a good review is a unique and difficult skill. Creative people often have trouble recognizing their skills as skills because eventually they feel like second nature, and they don't feel real and practical like building a house or domming. But it turns ...in... that this stuff actually is valuable. If it wasn't, people wouldn't be stealing it.
This is a nitpick, but since this essay is over 15 years old now I don't think the author will mind. This phrase always rankles me: > Let me explain what I mean. It turns out that if you're writing an essay or a youtube script you don't have to tell me that you're going to explain something to me before you explain it to me. I guess it acts as a "hack" to try to impart some gravity to what follows without actually ha…
"To the disappointment of my Asian parents, it turned out I hadn't shipped with the firmware needed to support violin playing."
If that turns out to be recent trend in rhetoric, that is mildly surprising.
When people make ironic uses of some rhetorical device, it inevitably happens that a number of people don't get the humor and start using it unironically, like that's the correct, casual thing to use for that situation.
There is however another very powerful aspect of the phrase: it suggests that something is not obvious. This makes it very powerful when correcting someone without making them feel like they said something stupid. "The sun is yellow" "You'd think that. But it turns out that without the atmosphere the sun is actually a blueish white, and high on the sky it's a neutral white"
I don't see the example would be different in conveying the same meaning if you omit the whole "85 turns out that".
"I gotta tell you, I am loving this Yada Yada thing. You know, I can gloss over my whole life story."
Interesting rebuttal written by a HN reader when the original was published and made it to the front page in 2010: https://web.archive.org/web/20100309032112/http://blog.ethan...