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Comment by K0nserv | Hacker News Reader

On Writing Well[0] is one of the best books I've read. I'd recommended it to anyone who wants to improve their writing.

0: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53343.On_Writing_Well

The first review on that page[1] is a well argued counterpoint to Graham's essay. Getting your ideas understood is often only one part of what you're trying to achieve.

If that really is your only goal, then I agree, the simpler the better.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/755379555?book_show_ac...

Having read a fair amount of Zizek and some Foucault I have to agree. Obfuscation can be just as useful as clarity.

Can you explain that? As an engineer I think generally anything that can be done more simply is nearly always better.

The pretension is the point. The readers want to come across as sophisticated by claiming to have understood impenetrable gibberish.

James Joyce fan I see ;-)

I agree with you personally. But find that not everyone wants to communicate clearly. Some people have made a career out of impenetrable communication.

Not the parent poster, but: think of speed bumps. They force you to slow down and pay more attention to the road.

Some writers, particularly post-modern ones, aim at the same thing. By forcing you to read their works carefully, you'll (in theory) be forced to think about them more.

That feels like the author is saying “I’m so clever you need to be told when to think about this,” whereas i would prefer to think at my own pace, without deliberate obfuscation, thanks very much.

If it’s a work of art, fair enough. If you’re trying to explain or argue something... then you’re probably hiding the holes in your argument or trying to sound smarter than you are.

...it’s not my reasoning. I’m explaining why some postmodern writers say they have that style. Personally I think it can be hit or miss.

I see, thanks for sharing. Just makes them sound pompous.

I don’t think this essay precludes that either, the 1% of 1% of books that are made better by being Proust rather than Vonnegut. And the chances of you being Proust are essentially zero.

If anything, it’s useful that language can sometimes slow you down. It’s one of the things language is able to do. Not everything benefits from sliding in as slickly as possible, letting you use your “mental models” to quickly grasp an idea you don’t already have.

I’m not fond of Foucault, but from time to time I explain to my pragmatic wife what Deleuze or Zizek are all about in $book, and as best as I try to explain them in plain words, much of what I got doesn’t come across. Tradutore traditore.

Although you should probably take into consideration that some professional linguists think the book is trash containing "prescriptivist poppycock" that the author doesn't even follow.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18345

Also a tiny study on whether adj/adv usage correlates with good/bad writing: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18398

A lot of writing rules are of the "follow it until you know how and when to break it" variety. That way if you never learn how to break them correctly, your writing is still a lot better than it was. It's no surprise that studies of writing already known to be good will find much rule-breaking, as one is not surprised to find race cars on a race track moving faster than we'd want any car to, ordinarily.

> A lot of writing rules are of the "follow it until you know how and when to break it" variety.

Prescriptivists never seem to add that clarifying nuance to their advice though.

> That way if you never learn how to break them correctly, your writing is still a lot better than it was.

That assumes their advice is good in the first place - when professional linguists call it trash, I'd have to wonder if it is.

> Prescriptivists never seem to add that clarifying nuance to their advice though.

They often do, in my experience. AFAIK it hasn't been common to attempt any kind of real, strict prescriptivism in English since the middle of last century (yes, I'm sure a few examples exist). These days it's mostly "write like this—until you know better" or "avoid X if your audience is Y, for such-and-such reason".

I agree. It is an excellent book that will teach you to use fewer and simpler words. I think it makes a lot of sense in technical and business writing.

Aside from knowing this though the most effective thing I've learned to do is to keep re-reading what I wrote. Reorganize phrases to keep connected thoughts nearby in text. In English you have a lot of freedom to put phrases all over the place in a sentence. When I write I very rarely put all the connected phrases next to each other in the first pass.

But I guess I'd generalize that to say: taking the time to re-read what you wrote and edit it actually makes a big difference. It took a lot of shitty writing and overcoming laziness in school before I learned this lesson.

Also highly recommend Writing Tools:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51750.Writing_Tools

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