Paul Graham and "It turns out" | Hacker News Reader

Paul Graham and "It turns out"

jsomers.net

35 pointsbkudria15 comments

I think Douglas Adams talked about how he used that phrase in Salmon of Doubt:

“Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression ‘it turns out’ to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is. It’s great. It’s hugely better than its predecessors ‘I read somewhere that...’ or the craven ‘they say that...’ because it suggests not only that whatever flimsy bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually based on brand new, ground breaking research, but that it’s research in which you yourself were intimately involved. But again, with no actual authority anywhere in sight.”

Funny this was also the top-voted comment on the previous discussion of this same post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1163040

I just want to know how you managed to resist phrasing your statement as:

"It turns out this was also the top-voted comment on the previous discussion of this same post..."

Because, If we were to do so, "it turns out" would be immediately followed by a citation of the authority in question?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162965

(How did this even get posted?)

It's a really good post though.

I think the dupe-detector only checks against URLs that have already been lazy-loaded into memory since the last time the server was restarted.

Oops, yeah, I don't know. Thanks for the pointer.

I often use it in a slightly different role: to introduce a new idea or discovery I've made without sounding like I'm fishing for compliments:

"I've thought a lot about a better way to implement this circuit, and it turns out that there is one."

I'm sure I subconsciously use it for the "appeal to invisible authority" thing, too.

The following comment on the blog cracked me up, mainly because of how true it is.

Bob says:

August 25, 2010 at 6:21 am

one word: “RADIOLAB”

''in other words, because “it turns out” is the sort of phrase you would use to convey, for example, something unexpected about a phenomenon you’ve studied extensively—as in the scientist saying “…but the E. coli turned out to be totally resistant”—or some buried fact that you have recently discovered on behalf of your readers—as when the Malcolm Gladwells of the world say “…and it turns out all these experts have something in common: 10,000 hours of deliberate practice”—readers are trained, slowly but surely, to be disarmed by it.''

i —like— writers who use —dashes— extensively

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Dickinson#Structure_and_s...

You should be cautious with dashes -- but not too cautious -- for a very simple reason -- they can confuse your reader, especially if -- well, let me put put this in a form of a joke -- used as many times as I smoke cigarettes per day.

There is another useful punctuation mark; most people have seemed to forgot that it exists; you can guess what it is, I suppose.

I use dashes a lot when I write - it tells a person, keep going, the thought you're about to read is still part of one thought, but separate slightly from the first part of the sentence.

While it looks ugly under analysis and would get you marked down by an English teacher, I find it pretty good at communicating quickly and getting points across.

--I use dashes a lot when I write--

ive been experimenting with a writing style that used hyphen as the only punctuation - http://makebelieve1.wordpress.com/about/ - but i realized that wordpress.com converts hyphens with spaces on either side into en-dashes and two hyphens into em-dashes

I really used to like that phrase; it makes real life into more of a narrative. Now it's becoming overused (that's not pg's fault). I'm avoiding it. Quel dommage.

In academic writing it's been overused for at least 10 years now, to the point where some reviewers will complain if you use it in a paper. Apart from being overused, in a lot of contexts it's something of an abdication of responsibility: you really did something, or are arguing something, but are trying to do a coy "well lookee, what did we find here" routine.

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