I don't know why but blog post comes off as a bit pretentious to me.
Writing well
131–135 of 135 posts
Re: Writing well
#132> Welcome
Wasted heading. What website doesn't welcome readers? An offline one.
> To write well is to think clearly.
No, it's to communicate well. There is beautifully-written nonsense.
> If you can think clearly, you can find something worth saying.
Meaninglessly asserts a relationship between two ambiguous thresholds. A vague thought not worth saying!
> An ideal place to start is thinking through what bothers you most in life.
No. That problem is likely too difficult. The correct essay topic is whatever thought won't go away until it's written down.
> The best writing is therapy that you publish for the world to learn from.
False: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books
That's where I stopped reading.
I know what Julian's trying to express. My Pubmind-T3 blogs are for publishing early and often, which is a best practice. But without Textmind (or David Allen's GTD), thinking in essays would be a frustratingly overloaded affordance.
Good writing, like clear thought, is reliably produced only via sound process.
Re: Writing well
#133You know what I consider engaging writing? HN comments Good HN comments are longer than tweets but shorter than essays, they strike a perfect balance of expressing an interesting idea in a reasonable time. And they always have an underlying, implicit amount of playful pedantry that makes them even more fun to read. This very comment was fun to write because not even I know if I'm being sarcastic or not.
I assumed you weren't being sarcastic.
Comments in general are pseudo-dialog. Whereas in real life, we stumble over our words and can't edit, in well-policed comment sections with sincere posters, we can all contribute to a Sorkian drama.
Re: Writing well
#134The resource that has spurred me into thinking differently about effective writing was shared on HN, from UChicago Social Sciences' Leadership Lab - The Craft of Writing Effectively. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM
This is why I love HN. These rare moments of hearing someone articulate something that I haven't quite grasped yet, but have seen glimpses of and have struggled with, presented clearly, insightfully. Feeling my brain being rewired. I've watched this talk multiple times over the last days and it is transformative.
It's not like anything he says is, by itself, that new or counterintuitive. But the whole talk, when fully digested, lets you view the world in an entirely different way.
The talk isn't about writing. It's not about science. Not about careers. It's about everything. The same thinking can be applied to speaking, to dating, to everything human.
What's in your head isn't intrinsically interesting to anyone except your mother. What value do you deliver? It's harsh. Harsh and cruel. It's not the cozy feel-good message you see everywhere nowadays. Maybe some would call the whole framing toxic. But would you rather taste the poison and then learn how to handle it, or would you stay ignorant and die of it (silently get ignored, nosedive your career, etc.).
In a masterfully meta way, the talk manages to deliver immense value.
Re: Writing well
#135The resource that has spurred me into thinking differently about effective writing was shared on HN, from UChicago Social Sciences' Leadership Lab - The Craft of Writing Effectively. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM
This is why I love HN. These rare moments of hearing someone articulate something that I haven't quite grasped yet, but have seen glimpses of and have struggled with, presented clearly, insightfully. Feeling my brain being rewired. I've watched this talk multiple times over the last days and it is transformative. It's not like anything he says is, by itself, that new or counterintuitive. But the whole talk, when full…
Absolutely. In that same vein, I've gotten a lot out of so many similar videos which are ostensibly about one thing, but to effectively use what they're teaching, you have to start learning/mastering something else entirely. "Indirect learning" is one way to put it, and a term I picked up from Randy Pausch's Last Lecture[0]. I've gained so much from watching that video, as well as his Time Management video[1]. So much so that I rewatch it about once a year, because every time you rewatch something, you're a different person in certain ways, and you often appreciate things much more the more you change and grow as a person.