Polite disagreement. To write (or feel the urge to write), you should have a point of view (unique povs are more interesting). To have a point of view, you need to engage with the thing in front of you. It can be a video that you disagree with, or agentic output you're belting into shape. The advice of "read more to write better" is incomplete IMO. I'd change it to "read/engage critically to write better". Else readi…
Indeed. As a young voracious reader I used to think that more reading is an unmitigated good until I came across Schopenhauer and his aphorisms. I try now to be more selective, life is short, and to engage more deeply with what I read. "The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some…
To become a better writer, read as much as you can
51–60 of 280 posts
Re: To become a better writer, read as much as you can
#52Polite disagreement. To write (or feel the urge to write), you should have a point of view (unique povs are more interesting). To have a point of view, you need to engage with the thing in front of you. It can be a video that you disagree with, or agentic output you're belting into shape. The advice of "read more to write better" is incomplete IMO. I'd change it to "read/engage critically to write better". Else readi…
When you think about it, humans have never been reading as much as we do right now thanks to Internet and digitalisation. Yet the quality has gone down when you compare it to, say, 1600's greatest works.
Re: To become a better writer, read as much as you can
#53Completely agree! I find writing deeply memetic - in that I often catch myself imitating the flow, style, word choices, punctuation and grammar of whatever reading material I'm currently immersed in. This unfortunately does not bode well for my writing ability as I read emails and Claude output all day. Recently, I've been reading a lot of building codes and compliance documents and I've develop annoying ticks like u…
> but I don't have time to read Keats. T.R. Napper explicitly states that you do in his piece: > But I am saying this: go look at your phone, and tell me what your average screen time is per day. Two hours? Five? Seven? If so – shut up: you’ve time to read. It doesn't have to be Keats. Start by building the habit (read in bed before sleeping!) and just read whatever you enjoy. If Keats seems like a hurdle, just pick…
You cannot read a book in 30” increments.
Re: To become a better writer, read as much as you can
#54Re: To become a better writer, read as much as you can
#55Completely agree! I find writing deeply memetic - in that I often catch myself imitating the flow, style, word choices, punctuation and grammar of whatever reading material I'm currently immersed in. This unfortunately does not bode well for my writing ability as I read emails and Claude output all day. Recently, I've been reading a lot of building codes and compliance documents and I've develop annoying ticks like u…
> I often catch myself imitating the flow, style, Its a struggle trying to "imitate the style" in writing. In music, you could keep playing all the songs in the style of your favorite artist and possible develop a close stylistic proximity to what you're imitating but in writing do you just write prose with the same wordings? i get the keep reading to develop your style but feels like adapting a style you want to mas…
In music, you have voicing sparsity, changes in voice count, preferred pitch ranges, tension/release cadences, embellishments, richness, playfulness, and a host of other characteristics. Rachmaninoff, for example (among other things), favours active, moving octaves quite deep in the base, extremely rich chords in the middle treble, simple (local) rythymic patterns, and expanding simple ideas like repeated arpeggios into large parts of a piece. He has more voices than other pieces typical of his time, though they tend to be combined somewhat simply when contrasted with counterpoint exercises and other techniques typically involving fewer voices.
In writing, you have sentence length, sentence complexity (they're different), typical volume used to express an idea, specific word choices, whether you tend to observe concrete or abstract ideas, the level of "truth" in your statements (in many flavours -- deadpan humour being quite different from a boldfaced lie directed toward the reader), technique choice used for signposting, willingness to violate "rules," and so on. If you picked even one project proposal from me at $WORK, you could reliably separate it from those written by hundreds of other engineers just by a few quirks -- habitually providing one level of motivation deeper than is typically expressed in technical writing (not just what we're doing, but what we're not doing and why we made that choice), a tendency to use British spellings and US words, a pattern of contracting any verb tense, sometimes with multiple apostrophes (e.g., "there'll've been"), refusing to terminate a non-exhaustive list without informing the reader that it's non-exhaustive, and so on. If you look at the reasons and motivations for one of those quirks, it's that I tend to have complete ideas (in technical domains) and want to express them completely and have found that every missing detail causes eventual problems -- only tempered by the fact that the requisite length tends also to cause important details to be overlooked on a casual read, which provides a mild damper on length. Understanding that motivation makes it easy to apply it as if you were me even when you don't have concrete examples regarding specific quirk/scenario interactions.
Re: To become a better writer, read as much as you can
#56Re: To become a better writer, read as much as you can
#57Completely agree! I find writing deeply memetic - in that I often catch myself imitating the flow, style, word choices, punctuation and grammar of whatever reading material I'm currently immersed in. This unfortunately does not bode well for my writing ability as I read emails and Claude output all day. Recently, I've been reading a lot of building codes and compliance documents and I've develop annoying ticks like u…
Re: To become a better writer, read as much as you can
#58At least this is what I came to find, as I have some issues currently with "blanking" more than I would like.
Re: To become a better writer, read as much as you can
#59I thought reading is not going to do that much, as it only improves your recognition, not your ability to actively use the vocabulary. At least this is what I came to find, as I have some issues currently with "blanking" more than I would like.