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Comment by voidhorse | Hacker News Reader

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.“ — Nathaniel Hawthorne (apparently)*

There’s definite value to simplicity in writing. At the same time, like all principles, people tend to run with the idea and misapply it. There are some cases in which your work demands a certain level of precision that’s only possible using complex words or jargon. Not to mention, writing that’s a little complicated can be a lot more fun! There are several novelists, essayists, and poets who are a joy to read not because they express their ideas as clearly and simply as possible, but because they manage linguistic acrobatics that make us realize there are ways to use language we never thought possible—often it takes some extra work to understand such output.

*: Have never taken the time to verify this myself.

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The quote is apparently attributable to "Thomas Hood"[1]

[1]https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/11/05/hard-writing/

I believe it. Hawthorne never wrote anything that was easy to read.

I believe the best piece of advice is, "Know your audience."

Yes. And for wanting to expand that audience simpler writing is an advantage IMO

I believe this is a piece of the best advice: 1. Who is your audience? 2. What do you want to tell them? 3. What do you want them to do?

These are the Three Questions.

My advice: answer them before you create a powerpoint, an email, an essay, a policy. They create a sharp tool for thought.

> “Easy reading is damn hard writing.“

Reminds me of Mark Twain: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one."

Not Twain, Pascal: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/.

Reading that paragraph, 20-30 percent could be removed.

Reading for pleasure should be entertaining. Reading for knowledge should be simple/concise.

> Reading for knowledge should be simple/concise

It can be a difficult balance. You can provide a lot of information in a few bullet points, but there may also be a lot of contextual information left out that leaves more curious readers wondering "why is like this and not another way".

Writing should have goals and reach them.

There is plenty of writing not meant to entertain or convey knowledge.

The most successful (by that I mean, placed the greatest number of ideas in the greatest number of brains) informative writing I've seen is a pleasure to read as well. Humans are capable of deriving multiple rewards from something at the same time. People who fetishize simplicity would take Carl Sagan's:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

And replace it with:

The Earth contains all humans and is far from Voyager I.

An, but there’s a fine line between simplification and reductionism.

For instance, your condensation of the graph completely misses the mention that people misapply general principles, and it also reduced linguistic creativity to “entertainment” which can mean a far different thing (e.g. one can write a book that’s wildly entertaining because of its characters but that sports none of the linguistic ingenuity I mention in the OP). Not to mention, you couldn’t even decide whether to use the word simple or concise! Sometimes you just can’t get around using a couple of “extra” words. Thus the abominable “/“. (Ick)

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