Hacker News Reader

Comment by vidanay | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who dislikes this style of expository writing where the story line is non-linear and written with an excruciating abundance of adjectives?

View on HN

No, definitely not, I think it's called narrative journalism [1] and I personally cannot stand it. My favourite is Colette's view on how to write a newspaper story (via Georges Simenon [2]):

> Just one piece of general advice from a writer has been very useful to me. It was from Colette. I was writing short stories for Le Matin, and Colette was literary editor at that time. I remember I gave her two short stories and she returned them and I tried again and tried again. Finally she said, “Look, it is too literary, always too literary.” So I followed her advice. It’s what I do when I write, the main job when I rewrite.

> INTERVIEWER: What do you cut out, certain kinds of words?

> Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence—cut it. Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels it is to be cut.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_journalism

[2] https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5020/the-art-of-fi...

Its in the 'Long Reads' section. This is a feature, not a news story.

Yeah, my wording was not perfect, but I can imagine that Georges Simenon was not using adjectives and the like for news stuff only.

This is called storytelling. It is one of the great gifts of being alive and human that we are able to create or enjoy a well told story.

While it’s not appropriate for every subject, or every hour of ones day, it is really a lovely thing and we should cherish those who expend the effort to create long and detailed narrative works.

If you’re not in the mood for a story of this kind and just want to know what happened, the headline is a pretty accurate summary.

Sadly it’s often needlessly superficial.

No, it's not just "storytelling", and your answer is pretentious in the extreme, painting an aesthetic preference as some fundamental appreciation for human life, and the opposite by implication as crass.

Storytelling is about narrative. It's about conveying a sequence of ideas in such a way as to make an impression. One can achieve storytelling without an abundance of irrelevant details ("Sometimes a travelling circus unfolds itself on the hard-packed sand of the heath’s carpark" does nothing to further establish our sense of setting, nor to characterize anything at all) and just being over-dramatic (leading with an inset quote about little at all, but making sure to lead with the title 'Counter-Terrorism Command').

Just because it's storytelling doesn't mean it's /good/ storytelling. The whole thing stays just one shade shy of purple. That is annoying as hell for a lot of people, and not at all "a great gift of being alive" that is "a really lovely thing." On the contrary: that's something a lot of even-literary editors would take a hacksaw to.

Couldn’t agree more. Know someone in the art history field, and all their academic texts are insufferable. People aren’t trying to deliver a point in the simplest way possible, instead they engage in some sort of linguistic masturbation. Obscure words, lengthy sentences, intricate syntactic constructions, etc. I assume this is some sort of a signalling method: “You can barely understand what I am taking about, and you don’t know half of the words, so I must be smart and this text must be important.”

Well I liked it.

It's funny that you criticise the parent for being pretentious, and then go on to explain to them what storytelling really is

It’s funny how you... </s>

This comment probably could have been reduced to one paragraph, with fewer parentheticals and italics.

Nonetheless I’m glad you posted it. I think it’s a positive thing when people expound at length on subjects that interest them.

Bah, humbug.

I think the main problem is not that it's told like a story, it's that it's told badly. The non-linear structure is incredibly confusing, you can absolutely tell the story chronologically and keep it interesting, but it's sort of in fashion to meander about the timeline without reason. I've found these types of stories much more engaging by simply skipping whole paragraphs that diverge from the main thread.

Yeah, someone did it well one time and everyone thought it was the structure alone that was good and not the person doing the writing.

> it's sort of in fashion to meander about the timeline without reason

There is a reason. A modern paper wants articles that are long, with the meat of the matter spread out thoroughly throughout, because this maximizes the amount of ads you can fit in between paragraphs, and maximizes the chances a reader will view them.

In general: if you're wondering why some aspect of journalism is rotten, it's most likely because it needs to accommodate advertising.

Has it occurred to you that the reader might like something that is long, because they see reading content of this type as primarily a form of entertainment?

It's not like there's a prize at the end, or some secret promo code hidden within the words. It's created for the purpose of idle consumption.

If readers didn't want long articles, there would be less long articles, but it's about inflating short articles to look longer (and stuff some ads).

non-linear stories written with an excruciating abundance of adjectives are called storytelling?

I had been of the mistaken opinion that the term covered far greater ground.

I really enjoyed it too. Some HN commenters could do well to learn about opinions!

Of course not. None of us is ever the only one. But it doesn't do much good to gripe about it, either. If you don't like it, don't finish reading it, and don't upvote the submission. That's sufficient. Complaining here, where authors almost never see it and would probably never care, is not a good use of your energy.

It would be nice if there was some author metadata in the page that you could hook an extension to in order to rate them. Keep from getting tricked in the future. Bore me once, shame on you, bore me twice, shame on me. haha

I'd say that usually the section of the title (newspaper, website, whatever) that produces a story is a better guide - usually, I'd water, writers write what editors ask for; when a writer can write many different forms of story filtering by writer seems less helpful.

I've have never understood this attitude that shuts down all 'complaining', especially about things that are free.

Why not take the opportunity to have a discussion about the purposes of journalism, instead of complaining about the commenters complaining? I think the comment invites valuable discussion about this.

Then go have that valuable discussion.

Exactly. I don't have a lot of interest in comments that boil down to, "This thing was not made for me and I'm upset!" People like different things. People like to make different things.

If somebody wants to start a discussion about narrative journalism's place in the world, fine. If they want to ask for a more condensed version of the story, also fine. Better still if they say, "I'm not a fan of narrative journalism, so I dug around and here are the 3 best traditional news stories I could find on the topic." But otherwise, I'm with the "I DON"T LIKE THING" angel: https://thefrogman.me/post/41542126320/by-jo-b-tumblr-for-we...

It's honestly inpenetrable to me. I don't know if i have a cognitive issue going on or what but my ability to pay attention is diminishing rapidly and I can't even make it through the first paragraph. There's too many little whiskers in the words that trail my minds eye off in a direction and it doesn't come back.

It's not an issue with your cognition. Articles these days are purposefully inflated in length to accommodate advertising.

It's you, I had no problem reading it all.

Put down the phone, step away from the computer. Read some books. Meditate. Take a long walk in a park with your phone off. Your attention span will expand once you start using it.

(Or there could be something going on outside your brain - being sick, hungry, or thirsty can all lower your effective intelligence, so can lacking something important like vitamins or sunlight; I've been stupid in the past due to all of these myself.)

I think lack of sleep is the main contributing factor for me right now. Attention has always been challenging but it’s positively effervescent now...unless i get locked into something, then its time warp.

Neither particularly healthy.

Lack of sleep definitely has a major affect on mental focus!

It's like New Yorker profiles and longforms, there is a well established structure to these kind of articles. I can't find it anymore but one time I think I had followed a link on HN to a page explaining this type of writing, it's much more structured than I would have thought.

I’m curious about this too if anyone has a link.

Probably not the link referred to above, but John McPhee wrote about how he decides on the structure of his long-form essays in the New Yorker.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/14/structure

You are not the only one. I generally despise it, as it often delays getting to points that could have been made as effectively but more succinctly. I think narrartive storytelling has its place, but it's way overused, and I see it in many articles that simply don't warrant it, like ones about current events. If the first paragraph starts out with some kind of "it was a dark and stormy night" narrative, my eyes just glaze over. I want to be informed, not read a novel. I only have so many hours out of my day to learn something, and I hate to have that time wasted by fluff.

Same here. This "it was a dark and stormy night" style is bad writing. I read a lot, I like reading novels. This is just an empty structure. In this particular case the bad writing almost killed an interesting subject.

This is a Guardian Long Read, it's not a current events article. Many of them are distributed as podcasts as well

I get that, and I don't necessarily hate it here. I just don't prefer it in general, and particularly hate it when the style ends up in articles that simply don't warrant it. The fact that the long read articles are often distributed as podcasts makes a lot of sense, now that you mention it.

You are not the only one.

This piece is almost a self-parody. Here's a quote:

Get him started on the subject, ale in hand at The Garden Gate, or on those rare occasions he called in to correct a glib host on talk radio, and Van Allen could go. “We’re an island of, what, 96,000 sq miles? Population that’s sky-high, growing, and the same number of houses we had 40 years ago. Too many people! Not enough houses! Me and most of my friends, we’re all in the same boat, long-termers, a community hundreds of thousands strong, not crashed in the gutter, people in paid employment, and all fucked – have been for years. It’s the way the legislation is … We didn’t choose this friggin’ path. This is the Housing Act of 1996 and every bullshit piece of legislation that’s been put in place since. It’s not our path. I fought it for years and then I threw in the towel. Said to myself: ‘Fuck it, I’m going camping.’”

This is like a McMansion hell of words.

I can't even capture it all with HN's markdown syntax. You have to look at the article. To see the real italics. To see the embedded link.

But you can see the wild flips in perspective, tense and syntax. You can see the nested quote marks at the end. You can see "sq miles".

Riddley Walker is easier to parse than this.

By contrast, I'm currently reading a book by Peter Hessler. He also practices non-linear storytelling. But his words are clear and carefully placed (or well edited). The narrative is not random. There is a continual sense that the reader's trust in the author will be rewarded.

It's interesting that nearly all of what you've included from the article is a direct quote.

The author could have editorialized it, but those aren't his words.

You are not and if it makes you feel uncomfortable, this may put you back on track http://z80.info/zip/z80cpu_um.pdf

I think you were making a joke, but in reality I probably could spend days reading the z80 CPU manual. I once requested the CPU manual for a Pentium from Intel and they sent me about 1200 pages in three volumes.

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-sdm

I like this one because I identify with the guy and happen to be in a mood to read a long thing today.

But in general I tend to agree with you. A lot of things that get posted on here come off as "hey look how many words I wrote", especially when I was just looking for distraction or a quick summary of something that sounded interesting. But that's what the comments are for I guess.

Indeed! I found myself just scanning the first sentence of each paragraph looking for details of a coherent story. 90% of the content of the article is just verbal fluff. Probably an interesting story in there, but too broken up and scattered.

This complaint is an eloquent example of the sad result of neglecting the humanities and arts in modern education.

I think it's a very British way of communicating something that's clearly quite amusing and frivolous.

It's meant to be closer to story telling than a the brief, cascading style that's prevalent across the mass-media.

Or could it just be puffery to get the word count up?

It's not specifically British. The New Yorker made its reputation on this type of story. Writers like John McPhee made a career out of it.

A style we often see online in the form of many presses of the next button to get the next round of adverts.

Then not a single picture of this bunker with it ending with what I can only be described as some form of sadistic joke "Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread"

Overall, it would win a TL;DR award from me, I started reading it but equally found it so painful as yourself that I skimmed it after a couple of pages.

For those feeling cheated about the lack of bunker pictures - this article has many gems from around London: https://londonist.com/2016/05/london-s-secret-bunkers

There are no pictures of it available. It was consider a crime scene and investigated by a counter-terrorism unit of the met after they found a gun there.

I don't know of any general provision in UK law preventing pictures of crime scenes from being published? Being designated a crime scene would make it hard from that point to get a picture, however.

Possibly for the counter-terrorism, though for the basic police, they are usually the first to post such pictures or videos - at least when no bodies in them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com