Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not wrong, but you're not going to convince anyone like this.
[flagged]
Claiming it doesn't make it so.
Rules of good writing (2007)
21–30 of 88 posts
Re: Rules of good writing (2007)
#22The first three paragraphs are good advice for business writing. Strunk made the same point with "Omit needless words". If you approach (or would like to approach) writing more from the perspective of a craft rather than meeting KPIs, Stephen King's On Writing is great.
You mean, "Omit words".
Or maybe I mean "Omit."
Or maybe if I didn't even post a reply, I would have added the same value to this thread.
Re: Rules of good writing (2007)
#23Re: Rules of good writing (2007)
#24Surely. Then you check Paul Graham, whose writing is influential in the world of startup, and find most of them are very long. Arguably unnecessarily so. Perhaps it's a tech startup thing? After all programmers are not famous for their refined literary taste. And then you check the few LitMag that people care enough to pay for even when the content is available for free, like Clarkesworld or BCS. Then you find senten…
Y Combinator came after his essays; though I don’t agree with everything Paul Graham says, those essays profoundly shaped me.
Re: Rules of good writing (2007)
#25Active voice. Minimum word count. That’s it, unless you’re Paul Graham.
Spoiler: You are not Paul Graham.
Re: Rules of good writing (2007)
#26> Readers comprehend “the boy hit the ball” quicker than “the ball was hit by the boy.” Both sentences mean the same, but it’s easier to imagine the object (the boy) before the action (the hitting). All brains work that way. I agree with this, but I doubt that all brains work this way. It's probably true of almost all English speakers. I think the processing effort is likely a side effect of English mainly using sent…
I had the same thought, glad you phrased it so succinctly! Surprisingly, a Holocaust-denying white nationalist is not someone you should trust on matters concerning global anthropology.
woah
Re: Rules of good writing (2007)
#27Surely. Then you check Paul Graham, whose writing is influential in the world of startup, and find most of them are very long. Arguably unnecessarily so. Perhaps it's a tech startup thing? After all programmers are not famous for their refined literary taste. And then you check the few LitMag that people care enough to pay for even when the content is available for free, like Clarkesworld or BCS. Then you find senten…
PG is not influential because of his writing though. His name is what gets his writing circulated, so I'm not sure if it's a good couter example.
The other way around.
Of course a lot of rich people got readers just because they're rich, but PG isn't the one of them.
Re: Rules of good writing (2007)
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had the same thought, glad you phrased it so succinctly! Surprisingly, a Holocaust-denying white nationalist is not someone you should trust on matters concerning global anthropology.
woah
I suspect they were talking about Scott Adams; not Michael Lynch (but it's fuzzy, due to ... unclear writing).
I'm not a huge fan of Scott Adams, because I disagree with his worldview, but I have other hills to die on.
He’s not wrong about this, but he’s just repeating very old “tribal knowledge,” about writing. I’ve been hearing the same advice, since I was a kid. Sometimes, I even follow it.
Re: Rules of good writing (2007)
#29> Readers comprehend “the boy hit the ball” quicker than “the ball was hit by the boy.” Both sentences mean the same, but it’s easier to imagine the object (the boy) before the action (the hitting). All brains work that way. I agree with this, but I doubt that all brains work this way. It's probably true of almost all English speakers. I think the processing effort is likely a side effect of English mainly using sent…
I think the counterargument to this simplistic assertion is that "The boy was hit by a ball" seems equally legible to me to "A ball hit the boy". If you're quickly reporting the details of an accident to a doctor and it's crucial to get the information across quickly, I think many speakers would still start with "He was hit by a ball", not "A ball hit him." We're not interested in assigning agency to the ball here, we're interested in the effects on the boy. We're focusing down on the boy first, then talking about what is happening. Is he hitting a ball? Getting hit by a ball? Nobody cares what the ball's doing, it doesn't need to be prepped for surgery.
Re: Rules of good writing (2007)
#30Surely. Then you check Paul Graham, whose writing is influential in the world of startup, and find most of them are very long. Arguably unnecessarily so. Perhaps it's a tech startup thing? After all programmers are not famous for their refined literary taste. And then you check the few LitMag that people care enough to pay for even when the content is available for free, like Clarkesworld or BCS. Then you find senten…
Here's pg's writing advice, published in 2005: