Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaylolx | Hacker News Reader

>He just doesn't care to improve his work.

Alternatively, you may overestimate how objective these rules are and how much they must correlate with some universal metric for good writing.

View on HN

Agreed. In my opinion, great writing has to be within the context of the time. A lot of us speak in a manner similar to how PG writes. You wouldn't consider great writing from 1890 with the same set of rules as you would something written in 2020.

That’s because you have very few exposition to 1890 writing. When I read published book from a hundred years ago (in French), I’m often stroke by how much clearer it is than say, newspaper garbage for instance. No only in style, but also how they write to inform instead of writing to hide facts.

It’s even more striking when watching archive videos from the 60’. People speak more slowly, are more composed and use wider vocabulary. It might not be as caricatural as the movie Idiocracy portrayed it, but in a way I feel we’ve slided into what they predict.

>When I read published book from a hundred years ago (in French), I’m often stroke by how much clearer it is than say, newspaper garbage for instance. No only in style, but also how they write to inform instead of writing to hide facts.

For this comparison to hold water, you should compare garbage newspapers from each period rather than different literary mediums.

I wouldn’t normally take apart an HN comment on grammar, but you are commenting on clarity of writing. If this is something you care about, than the following proofing may be useful. Format is (delete text)[insert text or comment].

———————

That’s because you have very (few exposition)[little exposure] to (1890 writing)[writing from 1890]. When I read published (book)[books;otherwise “often” in next segment doesn’t make sense] from a hundred years ago (in French), I’m often (stroke)[struck] by how much clearer it is than[,] say, (newspaper garbage)[awkward] (for instance)[redundant after using “than, say,”]. No[t] only in style, but also how (they)[unclear reference, refers to books but books don’t write, authors do] write to inform instead of writing to hide facts. It’s even more striking when watching archive videos from the 60’[s]. People speak more slowly, are more composed and use wider vocabulary. It might not be as (caricatural)[not a word and intended meaning unclear from context] as the movie Idiocracy portrayed it, but[,] in a way[,] I feel we’ve (slided)[slid] into what (they)[it] predict[s].

He said he read something in French, so the obvious assumption is that he's French (or French Canadian).

Being a grammar Nazi about what one can assume is a non-native English speaker's grammar is just plain 'ol dumb.

I don't think they were being mean. To me that should have been a PM, but we don't have those here.

My hypothesis is that our attention spans have decreased and this is a function of technological improvements. Because we seek out dopamine rewarding experiences we can satisfy that brain circuit by consuming novel content faster. We are basically attention seeking drug addicts. Take for example older movies vs modern movies. Today's special effects speeds up the pacing so that older movies feel boring. The same can be seen in TV shows. Seasame street is almost a case study where you can watch the change in realtime. Also older vs modern cartoons follow the same pattern. You could say it's almost frenetic. The effect holds for older vs modern video games as well although some games are different. YouTube as well.

One interesting thing I've observed is that with games like Minecraft and YouTube that kids are starting to become content creators. Where kids use to put on plays for the family in the living room, they can now effectively do the same but for the whole world. It's really fascinating.

http://paulgraham.com/talk.html

> A lot of us speak in a manner similar to how PG writes.

No one speaks with explicit sentence delimiters, and most of the criticism made were not of the sequence of words but details the additional visual signals of structure that appear in written but not spoken language.

Roald Dahl's work is some of the most delightfully readable and engaging writing out there in my humble opinion and that was written nearly one hundred years ago in the 1930s and 1940s.

Good writing is timeless, I may suggest that adding hyperlinks under a new word you introduced inside your essay that requires clicking on and reading a wholly different story to understand the current story you are reading, is a terribly under-performant way of communicating information inside an essay to the reader.

When did using "+" instead of "&" become acceptable in proper English? I understand this is a tech blog and I have no problem with "+" used in a tech context, the use in a virtue signalling piece on the rules of writing a good essay seems misplaced.

I think there is plenty of good and great writing that isn't timeless. Especially when it comes to essays, where the nature of what we know and care about changes so dramatically. An essay written to convince a slaver of the moral errors of slavery may seem so obvious to the modern reader as to be condescending, but, effective in it's time period, it was great writing.

True the content of the stories fade in and out of relevance and greatness.

The structuring of essays improves and dips in transcendent quality over time depending on the behaviour of authors at large and human understanding of communication through essay. The virtue and successful execution of well structured essays is timeless. RD's work is well structured. It's possible to learn and execute on structures that are proven to work across time and speak for themselves in the results.

I had to go back and search for the "+"es, but I think they're well suited to the context.

> I believe the formula I've given you, importance + novelty + correctness + strength, is the recipe for a good essay.

I wouldn't say he's really using "+" instead of "&". "importance & novelty & correctness & strength" doesn't provide the same feeling of adding, of mixing, to get a formula.

> When did using "+" instead of "&" become acceptable in proper English? I understand this is a tech blog and I have no problem with "+" used in a tech context, the use in a virtue signalling piece on the rules of writing a good essay seems misplaced.

Could be that tech bias. I've been coding awhile, and '+' reads as 'ADD', for inclusion, while '&' reads as 'logical AND', for restrictive subsetting. The '&' no longer sits right. (Plus, it's a shell and HTML metacharacter, thus it's a potential potent piece of trouble in casual typing and so something to be avoided.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com