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Nice. Are racists wrong?
I don't think your shaming and undermining writing has worked on anyone.
Rules of good writing (2007)
71–80 of 88 posts
Re: Rules of good writing (2007)
#72Re: Rules of good writing (2007)
#73[flagged]
“If nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with white people ... that’s a hate group”
Is that wrong though? If the poll is true it would be half of Blacks who are racist. If half of Muslims would say it is not OK to be a Jew, would a jewish person be in the right to be wary of them?
Of course that is already happening and in the US all racial/ethnic groups cluster together and segregate themselves.
Re: Rules of good writing (2007)
#74[flagged]
“If nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with white people ... that’s a hate group” Is that wrong though? If the poll is true it would be half of Blacks who are racist. If half of Muslims would say it is not OK to be a Jew, would a jewish person be in the right to be wary of them? Of course that is already happening and in the US all racial/ethnic groups cluster together and segregate themselves.
It's a classic case of survey subjectivity and misportrayal. There was a poll which included the question:
> agree or disagree with this statement: 'It's OK to be white.'
Of the black respondents, 53% agreed, 26% disagreed, 21% weren't sure. The slogan "it's OK to be white" has been heavily used in white supremacist campaigns. Many of the 26% who disagreed, may have been disagreeing with it's use to white supremacy.
Re: Rules of good writing (2007)
#75Most 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.
+1 for Style: TCAG
It's one of the few books that approaches the topic in a systematic, structured way. Not a rehash of platitudes like "try and be concise".
I know I need to "omit needless words". What I don't know is which words are "needless". Style answers that with linguistics and cognitive psychology.
Re: Rules of good writing (2007)
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes, PG is influential primarily because of his writing. He wrote On Lisp , which is still well-regarded today, before founding Viaweb. Viaweb itself did not make him well-known; there were many newly wealthy dot-com millionaires at the time, and he was just one of many, except that he wrote far more persuasive essays. At the time that I wrote https://paulgraham.com/redund.html we were discussing programming language…
Sorry but 'On Lisp' is not well regarded amongst common lispers at least. I don't fraternise with that group for over a decade, but they really disliked his general content.
Re: Rules of good writing (2007)
#77But clarity and brevity, though a good beginning, are only a beginning. By themselves, they remain bare and bleak.
When Calvin Coolidge, asked by his wife what the preacher had preached on, replied, “Sin,” and, asked what the preacher had said, replied, “He was against it,” he was brief enough. But one hardly envies Mrs. Coolidge.
Re: Rules of good writing (2007)
#78I believer there is an error in "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. (Notice I didn’t say, “That is the way all brains work”?)". It should be, "the SUBJECT (the boy) before the action (the hitting)." (I added caps for emphasis.)
Not to mention passive contructions are way overused (oops, I just used one). At least if the sentence mentions the acting subject, an active construction is shorter and less stuffy.
Re: Rules of good writing (2007)
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ha. That for me actually seems to be impaired, which is why I had to do special education. These days I usually have enough of a knowledge base to build hypotheses for most situations, but it was far more difficult for me to reason about the cause of things that I had nothing else to relate to. Stuff like this is probably why autism tends to be treated like some sort of super learning impediment.
Anyway, I think about causes first when I am either performing actions or processing other performances of actions. It's one of the reasons why I can appear to be good at empathy to certain people, because I can usually nail down the exact reason for something far better than others can guess why it maybe could have happened. It's weird how that works sometimes.
Re: Rules of good writing (2007)
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, PG is influential primarily because of his writing. He wrote On Lisp , which is still well-regarded today, before founding Viaweb. Viaweb itself did not make him well-known; there were many newly wealthy dot-com millionaires at the time, and he was just one of many, except that he wrote far more persuasive essays. At the time that I wrote https://paulgraham.com/redund.html we were discussing programming language…
Sorry but 'On Lisp' is not well regarded amongst common lispers at least. I don't fraternise with that group for over a decade, but they really disliked his general content.
Have you seen any critiques of the book you can share?