Any examples of writing/authors who write with algorithmic style – like code? | Hacker News Reader

Any examples of writing/authors who write with algorithmic style – like code?

4 pointselevenoh3 comments

i.e. have you found any inordinately clear algorithms / design patterns used in english writing? perhaps similar to how many programmers have clear patterns to how they write code

(e.g they use naming conventions, declare vars at top of scope, refactor reused code into standalone method etc.)

any examples of this from 'great' writers?

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Not algorithms — but you can detect linguistic structures that writers use like crutches. Some examples:

-Shakespeare and hendiadys (e.g. "sound and fury", "quick and dead"). Hendiadys are obliquely related words joined by "and" to reinforce one another. They often sound better than the adjective-ized versions, like "furious sound" or "quickly dead".

-Shakespeare and the personification of abstract nouns (e.g. "The better part of valour is discretion" or "the very heart of loss") With this technique, you attribute properties to the word itself — giving valour "parts" or loss a "heart". Another example: "Give me that man / That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him." — that abstract noun "passion" becomes a slaveowner. A lot of Shakespeare's quotable quotes are set up like this. Which makes sense — "John's passion" doesn't lend to universal soundbites, while capital-P "passion" doing the action, is something everyone can identify with.

-At a simpler level, you can look at someone like Mary Karr, who heavily relies on similes ("she had a butt like two bulldogs in a bag"). The "algorithm" here is basically powering-up any description, with a comparison joined by like/as/than

There is a rather obscure book titled "If Hemingway Wrote Javascript" by Angus Croll https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21487480-if-hemingway-wr... that contains literary reviews and source code in a variety of programming languages.

It's hard to describe this book; look at an excerpt at https://blog.honeypot.io/if-hemingway-wrote-javascript/. The source code actually runs and really does capture the writing style and idioms of the purported writers. I remember a factorial program by "Richard Feynman" that used numeric approximations that was just brilliant.

Yes, there's a book called 'The Pyramid Principle', written by Barbara Minto. It's the foundation for good practices in management consulting, and your hear about it a lot in business writing. It reads very much like a graph-algorithms book.

Two of most famous principles from it are:

1. The Pyramid Principle, which points out that people tend to write like you write a proof, first the supporting arguments leading up to the key point. The principle is a way to 'flip' paragraphs.

2. The SCQA Principle: This is exploiting the idea that the way we think is to try to slot facts into a narrative, and that we're naturally wired to like a certain narrative that's in the form of Situation-Complication-Question-Answer.

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