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Rules of good writing (2007)

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Re: Rules of good writing (2007)

#61

Post by degamad »

jameshart wrote: post #29
mtlynch wrote: post #4

> 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, w…

I think you're onto something with "agency". In particular, "a car hit him" seems much less out-of-place than "a ball hit him", but we're more used to treating cars as first-class objects with agency, as compared to how we perceive balls.

Re: Rules of good writing (2007)

#62

Post by GGByron »

LoganDark wrote: post #40
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over 80% of the world's languages are classified as SVO or SOV, actually, and probably over 90% of all first language speakers today speak one of these two. Their overwhelming dominance compared to the other four possibilities have led researchers to conclude there may actually be a cognitive benefit to putting the subject first.

There probably is. For me receiving the subject after anything else requires me to buffer everything else awaiting the subject in order to parse it correctly. My brain seems to naturally work in cause->effect order so it's naturally easiest for me to process the cause first and then the effect. I don't think everyone works the same way, but there is definitely an order of information flow that is most efficient for m…

"My brain seems to naturally work in cause->effect order"

You must be Jesus. Most brains observe events first and use that information to reason about their causes.

Re: Rules of good writing (2007)

#63

Post by gblargg »

coffeeisyummy wrote: post #22
CharlesW wrote: post #18

The 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)

#64

Post by gblargg »

alvah wrote: post #37
bbor wrote: post #8

Earlier 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.

>Holocaust-denying Didn't he write "no reasonable person doubts that the Holocaust happened" in the blog post you are referring to? That's an....unusual way to deny the Holocaust.

A discredited organization labeled Adams a Holocaust-denier, so NPCs consider him such.

Re: Rules of good writing (2007)

#65

Post by sandspar »

JadeNB wrote: post #45
sandspar wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? It's trivially easy to write a Reddit post that gets thousands of readers. A mid tier YouTube scriptwriter can reach tens of millions of readers/listeners every week. A well-written Instagram comment can receive millions of views in a matter of days. If you're content to remain nameless then you can reach millions of readers.

> If you're content to remain nameless then you can reach millions of readers. Why should namelessness help? None of the examples you mention seem to require it.

Sorry, I would have more accurately said "if you're willing to piggyback on a larger creator's channel", which typically but not necessarily involves near-anonymity, and where one doesn't need to have a famous name.

Re: Rules of good writing (2007)

#66

Post by klodolph »

kens wrote: post #59

Most writing articles (including this one) are rehashes of Strunk & White. One exception is "Style: Toward Clarity and Grace", which provides a new, higher-level way of understanding writing and how to make it better. I highly recommend that book if you're looking for something more advanced than the standard advice.

Agreed, and rehashing Strunk & White sucks because Strunk & White wasn’t a great guide in the first place. Strunk & White boiled down the advice to aphorisms and you have to kind of understand what good writing is before you read it. The aphorisms don’t make sense if you don’t already understand them.

Meanwhile, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace gives concrete advice, examples, and exercises.

Re: Rules of good writing (2007)

#68

Post by globnomulous »

mtlynch wrote: post #4

> 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 processing effort is likely a side effect of English mainly using sentence constructions that go subject->verb->object. Not all languages do that, so I suspect that your brain has an easier time processing whatever's most common in the language.

This isn't true at all. Passive voice is extremely common in everyday speech, and sentences constructed with linking verbs are almost certainly more common than either active or passive voice.

And that accounting of the language considers only utterances consistinf od grammatically correct, complete main clauses, which constitute by far the minority of the sentential constructions a native speaker of English will produce in a day.

If everything you said in a normal day were a complete sentence, let alone uniformly or predominantly active voice, you'd sound completely deranged and unhinged.

If whatever's most common in the language really were easiest for readers or listeners to understand, then active-voice constructions should be the most cognitively challenging. They aren't.

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