111–120 of 135 posts
Note that Julian runs an SEO and growth marketing company, so the type of writing here is more for that purpose, to sell your product, than to become the next great author.
I found this very hard to read. There are so many short sentences and bullet points that it looks like a PowerPoint presentation masquerading as prose. What he seems to have lost with this approach is a rhythm. It's a staccato battering with ideas. I'd much rather be seduced and cradled by writing that made me feel I'm learning by osmosis and not trepanning. EDIT: The author illustrates how his writing goes wrong by…
Doesn't this depend a lot on _what_ and _where_ you are reading? I suspect people have completely different styles when reading e.g. a fiction book on a Kindle vs. a tutorial about deploying a Docker container. I wouldn't be surprised if generation/age played a factor too.
That said, the author strikes me as trying to teach something he isn't actually good at while pretending to be authorative. Most of this advice is standard stuff found in Strunk and White, Stephen King's "On Writing," and a hundred other solid books on this topic, but his style is disjointed, his examples aren't great, and then there's just the sheer silliness:
> Why? The best writing is therapy that you publish for the world to learn from.
No, it's really not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been thinking about how useful raw engagement metrics actually are. Likes on your post or view on your video. These metrics count every reader and audience member equally, when they are far from equally relevant to you. By writing according to some common denominator you may trade a smaller high-quality audience off for a larger low-quality audience. For example if you want to promote your work, who cares if you…
There's some value in raw numbers, especially at scale. It's reasonable for a company to care about how many views a product page, how to, or topic page gets. And it's a proxy for a lot of other things that are really hard to suss out. (Though you can measure things like how far people read/watch, time they spend, etc.) But for me personally, I mostly go by what I want to read and I don't really care if an SEO plug-i…
This may seem obvious, but sometimes people can get caught up in cargo-culting the established trendy marketing strategies that are actually designed for another use case than yours.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are not the only one. It's irritating to read. Complexity and nuance are sacrificed because the writer values concision over truthfulness. You can see the problem in the first two sentences of the article: "To write well is to think clearly. If you can think clearly, you can find something worth saying." These are pleasant aphoristic paragragraphs, but what they say is not actually true. They gesture towards some…
There's another problem with being obsessed with concision: it's more compatible with simple ideas than nuanced ideas. I work at a place where I'm required to explain urban planning issues while using the simplest-possible subjects in all sentences. So, I can write, "Transit improves traffic," but I can't write, "To the extent that transit enables residents to reach destinations more efficiently than driving, a great…
Transit improves traffic
When many people travel on the road as a unit - in a bus for example - traffic flow improves compared to everyone driving their own car and thus travelling as separate units of traffic. Most of the bad stuff we dislike about traffic results from "friction" and interaction: yielding at intersections, the gaps between vehicles following each other, being slow to react on green light, and so on. But traffic won't automatically improve with more transit. It needs to be planned such that ...
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In your long version (which you admit can be improved) I dislike the fancy, prestige words of "residents", "destination", "greater number or proportion of people" can just be "more people". I find that good, world-renowned experts are not afraid to write in simple words but still give deep insights into special topics. I find that the less pretentious and shorter the words are in an academic paper, the more likely it is to come from a top research group or top researcher.
I had just moved across the country after leaving my job at a newspaper. The job posting was for a copy editor at an in-house trade magazine at a Texas education nonprofit. They called me in for an interview, likely because I had copy editing experience on my resume.
Nothing unexpected happened. I talked to a few folks and the hiring manager, completed a copy editing exercise meant to test my competence at finding and addressing various spelling/grammar/AP style issues, and made my way back to the hiring manager before the final meeting with a few higher level executives.
The whole day went to shit when I found myself giving an honest answer to an off-hand question posed by the hiring manager. I heard myself talking about my fascination with writers, and especially those who made convincing and beautiful arguments while ignoring seemingly every rule and convention of the grammar and style books I had mastered in journalism school. As the words wound out of my brain through my mouth I knew there was no getting back to the promising path to a full-time copy editing job I had been on for the last few hours.
Based on our conversation thus far I knew this hiring manager was unlikely to be interested in my point of view, or in hiring me, now that the truth was out. A few minutes after we met she told me about how important the copy editor role was, especially since the educators who read the magazine tended to be sticklers when it came to matters of grammar and style. She knew this to be true because her first title at the company was, you guessed it, Copy Editor. It was as if I was running the final stages of a FAANG interview gauntlet, only to find myself loudly extolling the benefits of working for small startups.
She reacted as negatively as you would expect, and we moved on to the final portion of the day with the executives. By now I knew my job search would have to continue. The day wasn’t a total waste, however, because the CEO and founder of the nonprofit asked me the final question of the day.
“Is there anything else you want to know about me or the nonprofit I started before we wrap up?”
I knew there would be no job offer, so I decided to ask about something I was actually interested in knowing. I asked him if he had any regrets in his life, and told him I wanted to know because he was clearly successful and I rarely had the opportunity to ask about the pitfalls of success. He looked at me for a few moments and I wasn’t sure if I had managed to step in another pile of shit. When he finally responded it was to tell me slowly, then quickly, about the neglected relationships in his life, especially those with his children. We talked about the nature of family and friendships for a few minutes and I came away feeling much better about the whole situation.
I didn’t get the job (they gave it to a freshly minted English PhD) but I’ll never forget what I learned that day. Grammar and style don’t really matter, even when you’re interviewing for a job ostensibly concerned with nothing else. People and our connections absolutely do matter, and it’s those relationships by which we should judge our success in life.
I found this very hard to read. There are so many short sentences and bullet points that it looks like a PowerPoint presentation masquerading as prose. What he seems to have lost with this approach is a rhythm. It's a staccato battering with ideas. I'd much rather be seduced and cradled by writing that made me feel I'm learning by osmosis and not trepanning. EDIT: The author illustrates how his writing goes wrong by…
I think both versions are kinda lacking in rhythm. Here's my attempt, certainly imperfect too: If you make an effort to omit unnecessary words, your sentences will be easy for readers to understand without slowing down. It also reduces the chance that readers will get bored and quit. I used to uncritically accept the idea that concision was the single important thing about writing. The problem is, if you only ever wr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree with two of Safires points: There is nothing wrong with splitting an infinitive. Shakespeare does it and Star Trek does it. Passive voice is fine. Sure it can be used to make the text impersonal and hide responsibility. But is can also be used to make the text clearer and to emphasize what is important. Use it as appropriate.
Use as appropriate, yes. But there are some writers who massively over-use it. Most such rules can sometimes be broken to good effect, but they offer a useful default. In many cases, rewriting so as to "follow the rules" will aid clarity. Deviations and exceptions should be the result of careful consideration, not just carelessness.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree with two of Safires points: There is nothing wrong with splitting an infinitive. Shakespeare does it and Star Trek does it. Passive voice is fine. Sure it can be used to make the text impersonal and hide responsibility. But is can also be used to make the text clearer and to emphasize what is important. Use it as appropriate.
Use as appropriate, yes. But there are some writers who massively over-use it. Most such rules can sometimes be broken to good effect, but they offer a useful default. In many cases, rewriting so as to "follow the rules" will aid clarity. Deviations and exceptions should be the result of careful consideration, not just carelessness.
Now do that every day at least once.
Congratulations. You're a writer.
[Edited because I read it out loud to myself and some parts sounded stupid]