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Ask HN: How do you write great sentences, paragraphs, or articles?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you write great sentences, paragraphs, or articles?

#81

Post by ropz »

FreakLegion wrote: post #51
austingunter wrote: post #38

As a person whose core skillset is writing, not programming, I feel more qualified to comment on this particular HN thread than most others which I prefer to demure on. I love the question about how to write well. It's the craft I've dedicated my life to, and I'm grateful to see a group of really smart people investing time in the skill. It validates the effort I've poured into becoming the writer I am today. Particu…

Yep, leaving a preposition at the end of the sentence is grammatically incorrect No it isn't. Latin-based grammars trumpeted this "rule" for many years[1], but those days and that theory of English grammar are long gone. In Churchill's words: "This is the sort of English up with which I will not put." Edit: I don't disagree with the gist of your advice, of course. This is just a bizarre illustration of "know your aud…

Another (oft-cited) example:

"What did you bring that book that I don't like to be read to out of up for?"

Re: Ask HN: How do you write great sentences, paragraphs, or articles?

#82

Post by manku_timma »

brudgers wrote: post #76

Short answer, I usually don't. Longer answer, the more I write on HN the better my writing probably becomes because I get feedback from "my" audience in the form of comments and votes. Over the past week, I read And So It Goes, a biography of Kurt Vonnegut. He spent fifteen years as a full time writer before Slaughterhouse Five was published. He had been writing press releases for GE before that. He had written for h…

Off topic, but that was a nicely written bio. Vonnegut's life was a lot more complicated than I had imagined from reading his books.

Re: Ask HN: How do you write great sentences, paragraphs, or articles?

#83

Post by telemachos »

jpeterson wrote: post #66
zedshaw wrote: post #63

Try this out: 1. Get the book "Adios Strunk And White". Strunk And White is a horrible book to learn how to actually write English well. It's full of contradictions, has some bad grammar in it, doesn't follow its own advice, and tries to make English a proscriptive language rather than dynamic like it is. The Adios book basically breaks you out of the S&W mode of thinking and gets you thinking about different forms a…

Strunk And White is a horrible book to learn how to actually write English well. It's full of contradictions, has some bad grammar in it, doesn't follow its own advice Can you give some examples?

In addition to the "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice" article that Zed links, Language Log[1] is a great source if you want to learn more about the problems with prescriptivism and Strunk and White in particular. Geoffrey Pullum is one of the founders, and he writes there often.

[1] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/

Re: Ask HN: How do you write great sentences, paragraphs, or articles?

#84

Post by greyboy »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #49
c0riander wrote: post #2

In high school, I was lucky to have multiple teachers who were sticklers for imparting the essential building blocks of strong writing. We spent a lot of time "in the weeds," rote-learning vocabulary, sentence patterns, paragraph construction, and finally, structures for the expository essay (above and beyond the academic essay we mastered in school.) The surprising thing, even to someone like me who considers hersel…

bloggergirl, you are hellbanned. For no particular reason, near as I can tell.

Here is what she said:

bloggergirl 21 hours ago | link [dead]

I'll add to this list my all-time favorite writing companion: Virginia Tufte's "Grammar As Style". It's been out of print forever, which is tragic, and, when you can find it, it usually sells for over $100 - even in rough shape. "Artful Sentences" is meant to replace "Grammar As Style", but I prefer the original. If you want to tie all the rules together so you can understand why we even have grammar in the first place and how truly magical grammar can be to shaping a sentence or paragraph, track down this book.

Interesting: Virginia Tufte is the mother of data visualization guru Edward Tufte.

(Other good books for writers and writers-in-training: "Bird by Bird" by Anne Lamont, Stephen King's "On Writing" and a collection of letters on writing by F. Scott Fitzgerald, also called "On Writing". Oh, and please don't hate on White's "Elements of Style" --- it may be old, but it's foundational.)

Re: Ask HN: How do you write great sentences, paragraphs, or articles?

#85

Post by ianstormtaylor »

nelsonweiss wrote: post #61
Petrushka wrote: post #47

KISS. Too much writing in the non-fiction world, whether it be academic, scientific, or related to business, is far too complex for its own good. This is seemingly to overwhelm, to simultaneously weed out and impress those who are not deeply versed in the subject, but in almost no cases is that a positive development. For academia and science, the point of your work should be to encourage knowledge and learning, whic…

Rewritten to be less complex and avoid unnecessary use of an acronym (not picking on you, just figured your good advice would be more easily read if it was written simpler): Keep it simple, stupid. Too much non-fiction writing is overly complicated. It seems like people write elaborately in order to overwhelm and impress those less familiar with the subject, but this is a bad idea because complexity interferes with c…

Just having fun...

Non-fiction writing is plagued by unnecessary words and complicated structures. Extra words aren't impressive; they're confusing! Legal documents are a rare exception that use complex structures to limit ambiguity (or to create it). Unless you're drafting an air-tight contract, complexity will only contaminate your message.

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