Good Writing

Post by adamgordonbell » Sat, May 24, 2025, 5:22 PM UTC

pvg wrote: post #27

adamgordonbell wrote: post #22

Counter point: systems that force complexity into legible forms often destroy valuable nuance, and richness. - seeing like a state

Scott's 'legibility' comes with a very explicit consumer - a large power structure like a state. Written style is not like that at all - pg can't force to anyone to write in his preferred way nor is anyone obliged to like it.

Post by saltwatercowboy » Sat, May 24, 2025, 5:24 PM UTC

antirez wrote: post #36

layer8 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure about that. Does having the right ideas really strongly correlate with having a talent for expressing them eloquently? While clarity of thought facilitates clarity of writing, that’s in principle orthogonal to the right/wrong axis, especially in the ethical sense implied by the Moretti quote. And as the sibling comment correctly observes, the existence of language barriers rather disprove that hypothesis…

Sure, it's not a 1:1 map, but often who does an excellent job, does it along all the line: form, content, and the best papers are even shorter normally... They don't have to justify with many pages the lack of real content. About the nobel price quote: it shows that the most powerful language is unexpected, breaks the obviousness of things, something that ancient greeks knew very well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R…

Post by antirez » Sat, May 24, 2025, 5:26 PM UTC

yojo wrote: post #65

antirez wrote: post #15

I believe that it is not that style helps the content to be more right, not in the way PG believes (like in the example about writing shorter sentences), it is that a richer style (so, not shorter, but neither baroque: a style with more possibilities) can reflect a less obvious way of thinking, that carries more signal. I'll make an example that makes this concept crystal crisp, and that you will likely remember for…

Reminds me of a line by Douglas Adams describing some particularly crude alien invaders: “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.” He could have written something like: “The blocky ships hovered seemingly in defiance of gravity.” Instead he picked a phrasing that’s intentionally a little hard to parse, but the reader feels clever for taking the time to get the joke, and remembers it. Paul’s…

Post by tptacek » Sat, May 24, 2025, 5:28 PM UTC

gist wrote: post #67

tptacek wrote: post #29

Look, anything that gets HN people to write second drafts of comments, I'm fine with it. I mean... no, ok, just going to leave it there.

Writing wise I have a great deal of respect for you (and other top commenters) because you don't have people edit and review what you say you just write it (and take lumps or accolaydes). Something I've mentioned before is I can't get over the fact that Paul has mulitiple people review his essays prior to publishing (which others have defended when I've made the same comment before). I (as most people do) write clien…

Post by davidivadavid » Sat, May 24, 2025, 5:30 PM UTC

lutusp wrote: post #66

"Good writing" nearly always collides with something else, for example a writer paid by the word. Or a writer granted too little time to compose prose, as opposed to merely creating it. A shorter exposition is nearly always (a) better, and (b) more work. I'm reminded of Mark Twain's remark, “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” A classic writing book, now nearly forgotten -- "St…