Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Writing Is Magic

brooker.co.za

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 20 posts

Re: Writing Is Magic

#11

Post by GartzenDeHaes »

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #4

I'm always conflicted about long-form writing. Particularly when dealing with senior management and executives, the "wall of text" is a great way to ensure no one actually reads what you have to say (edit: unless, like the OP, you work at Amazon where Bezos established the notion of the 6-pager). In those circumstances I tend to opt for inverted pyramid writing, in the hopes that the skimmers will get the gist and fo…

What I would often do was write a result or impact sentence or two, a summary of no more than three bullet points, and a summary of how or where to follow up. Someone who is in 8 hours of meetings a day and receives 200+ emails a day isn't going to read anything longer.

Re: Writing Is Magic

#12

Post by cratermoon »

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #4

I'm always conflicted about long-form writing. Particularly when dealing with senior management and executives, the "wall of text" is a great way to ensure no one actually reads what you have to say (edit: unless, like the OP, you work at Amazon where Bezos established the notion of the 6-pager). In those circumstances I tend to opt for inverted pyramid writing, in the hopes that the skimmers will get the gist and fo…

I studied journalism in college, and wrote a great deal in the (now archaic, maybe?) style of the inverted pyramid, and learned about writing a great lead.

An interesting thing I read about writing recently is the enormous difference between writing as if you are speaking to yourself, as juveniles typically do in school when they are asked to write a 300-word essay, and writing with an audience and goal in mind, which is everything in business writing.

You last paragraph succinctly states the technique.

Re: Writing Is Magic

#13

Post by pkoird »

I feel that the author adequately explained why writing is important but never quite justified why it is magical. I was hoping to read more about how writing is essentially a hypnosis spell where you use runes to make the readers hallucinate (which is what fiction & fantasy essentially do).

Re: Writing Is Magic

#14

Post by kashyapc »

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #4

I'm always conflicted about long-form writing. Particularly when dealing with senior management and executives, the "wall of text" is a great way to ensure no one actually reads what you have to say (edit: unless, like the OP, you work at Amazon where Bezos established the notion of the 6-pager). In those circumstances I tend to opt for inverted pyramid writing, in the hopes that the skimmers will get the gist and fo…

Yes, that "wall of text" is a real problem, especially by those who don't realize that "everyone is in a hurry" almost all the time. I solve it by first adding a top-level "executive summary" with all the critical information, followed by a "Details" section with nicely formatted lists with fully-dressed sentences.

And definitely check out the book "Style: Towards Clarity and Grace" by Joseph Williams and Gregory Colomb (there are several editions of this; but any earlier edition would do; I have the 10th edition). I wrote a bit more about it here[1] in the past.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24272968

Re: Writing Is Magic

#15

Post by Biologist123 »

pkoird wrote: post #13

I feel that the author adequately explained why writing is important but never quite justified why it is magical . I was hoping to read more about how writing is essentially a hypnosis spell where you use runes to make the readers hallucinate (which is what fiction & fantasy essentially do).

If you have a moment to elaborate please do!

Re: Writing Is Magic

#16

Post by jerf »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #8
BaseballPhysics wrote: post #4

I'm always conflicted about long-form writing. Particularly when dealing with senior management and executives, the "wall of text" is a great way to ensure no one actually reads what you have to say (edit: unless, like the OP, you work at Amazon where Bezos established the notion of the 6-pager). In those circumstances I tend to opt for inverted pyramid writing, in the hopes that the skimmers will get the gist and fo…

I agree a wall of text will often not be read. But I think often the problem is with the author for having written it in the first place, rather than the reader for not being bothered. It's like that famous Pascal quote, "if I had more time, this letter would be shorter". One part of that is about redundancy and verbosity: with some effort it's usually possible to say the same thing with a lot less text. The other pa…

At this point, I explicitly call my "second draft" a "word removal pass". That's most of what happens. If I were ever to write fiction, I'd also write myself a text editor customized to some of my own bad habits, like, it would syntax-highlight all adverbs. I use them a lot in first draft writing but most of them should be removed.

As a sibling to your comment says, I have often unashamedly included an "executive summary". They seem to appreciate it. I also rather frequently pull them off the email chain when I'm diving into technical details, unless they explicitly ask to stay up-to-date on the entire chain. Then, if I want to re-update them, I'll add them back in, so they get the whole chain in one shot if they really want to dig and I'm not "hiding" anything, but they still get their summary.

Upshot, don't be scared to put "executive summaries" in. It's not sarcasm and it's not a joke.

Re: Writing Is Magic

#17

Post by oofnik »

This is good advice for clarifying your own thoughts, but your ability to communicate effectively through writing is very dependent on whether or not your team is composed of readers.

I personally enjoy writing design documents and feel that they help me organize and systematize my thinking in a way that few other tools can. My coworkers don't share this view, however, so I usually end up writing for an audience of one.

Re: Writing Is Magic

#18

Post by pkoird »

Biologist123 wrote: post #15
pkoird wrote: post #13

I feel that the author adequately explained why writing is important but never quite justified why it is magical . I was hoping to read more about how writing is essentially a hypnosis spell where you use runes to make the readers hallucinate (which is what fiction & fantasy essentially do).

If you have a moment to elaborate please do!

So people (unless they have aphantasia) immerse themselves in whatever they are reading and conjure up imaginations of the world that the fictional novel is portraying, right? If you think about it, what people read is essentially symbols of certain optical structure and you could argue that runes (in the traditional sense) are not much different as well! So yeah, writing can comfortably be thought of just runes that makes people hallucinate.

Re: Writing Is Magic

#19

Post by Biologist123 »

pkoird wrote: post #18
Biologist123 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a moment to elaborate please do!

So people (unless they have aphantasia) immerse themselves in whatever they are reading and conjure up imaginations of the world that the fictional novel is portraying, right? If you think about it, what people read is essentially symbols of certain optical structure and you could argue that runes (in the traditional sense) are not much different as well! So yeah, writing can comfortably be thought of just runes that…

It’s certainly an enchanting explanation. Of course some act on those hallucinations as if they were spellbound - and the Capitol riots had a definite feel of tweet-induced chaos. Interesting idea.

Re: Writing Is Magic

#20

Post by loughnane »

jerf wrote: post #16
quietbritishjim wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree a wall of text will often not be read. But I think often the problem is with the author for having written it in the first place, rather than the reader for not being bothered. It's like that famous Pascal quote, "if I had more time, this letter would be shorter". One part of that is about redundancy and verbosity: with some effort it's usually possible to say the same thing with a lot less text. The other pa…

At this point, I explicitly call my "second draft" a "word removal pass". That's most of what happens. If I were ever to write fiction, I'd also write myself a text editor customized to some of my own bad habits, like, it would syntax-highlight all adverbs. I use them a lot in first draft writing but most of them should be removed. As a sibling to your comment says, I have often unashamedly included an "executive sum…

I use Vale and it’s syntax highlighting plugin for sublime text to do just this.

I have it open all day use it to compose anything more than a few sentences long.

Post reply on HN