A writing tip I learned at Oxford
newsletter.timber.fm
newsletter.timber.fm
- If I can't find the most important part of your writing in 3 seconds, I've already moved on.
Take the linked article - I clicked on it for a writing tip. In the first paragraph they suddenly tell me it's not about a writing tip, it's 'weaving together three things'.
Now I scan the article quickly looking for the writing tip, because I don't care about the history of the writing tip before I've evaluated if it's any good.
3 seconds are up, and my patience is gone, and while the author is very interested in their history of writing tutorials at oxford, literally nobody else is.
I'll only care about it if I think the writing tip is interesting, but I can't find the writing tip because it's organized like a recipe blog - you click for a recipe, and they hide the recipe somewhere on the page. At least with recipes you can recognize the format of the recipe down the page somewhere, making scanning easier. With this I can't even do that.
So here's the writing tip for the author - don't hook someone in promising a writing tip, and then hide that writing tip. If it's enough of a tip to get me interested in your story, I'll read it. If it's not, then you just clickbaited me and nothing you write matters.
I classify this as some sort of weird ultra snobbery ('I learned this at oxford') clickbait ('here's a writing tip I'm going to hide in a diary entry'). Promise me a writing tip, give me the writing tip, or lose my interest forever (because now I classify you as recipe blog I won't click on it again).
on edit: by quote symbol I mean this is the point that someone else in the parent comment or the article made that I am going to respond to in my following bit of text.
So I guess it's just not that important to me, overall, to use a convention that few people have ever used. If HN had a basic quote function it wouldn't matter.
My favorite writing tip is knowing one’s audience. (:
The ">" is ubiquitous in email, usenet, Markdown, Github and Discord, which are more familiar. It seems to be a widely used convention here on HN as well, even though HN software doesn't highlight it.
It's baked into a lot of modern software due to long-standing convention for about half a century.
Nowadays that software includes anything taking input with a vague similarity to Markdown. There's a lot of that about.
Consider me your quote symbol iconoclast. There's no reason for > to mean quote in a system that doesn't implement quotes. It's just a cultural construct being followed 'because thats how it was'.
That's the point. It doesn't have to "do anything" in software or be "implemented" to be useful - it has shared meaning in people's minds.
You're reminding me of the small child who receives a non-electronic action figure for Christmas and immediately asks, "but what does it do?"
Put it like this: it is connected to an actual function, it's just that that function is in people's minds.
As for people getting offended, I think you might be projecting. Let's look at how part of this conversation might have played out in an alternate universe:
> I think it's actually a carry over from reddit, where it activates the quote, while here on hacker news it does nothing. It's just a symbol.
> > It’s a carryover from long established internet (plaintext email, Usenet, etc.) convention, which is where reddit (and lots of other forums) got it, too.
> > > Oh wow, I didn't know that! It's always cool to learn about the history of where things we take for granted come from.
The point is, there's no need to take offense at a minor educational correction.
So is all of language. There is no reason for “cultural construct” to mean cultural construct, its just a cultural construct. But shared cultural constructs are what enables communication.
Lots of people have used it, because lots of places have copied it from where it originated.
At any rate, HN is mostly-plain-text environment that is more similar than most newer places that have adopted the convention to the context in which it originates, so in addition to its relevance to past experience, it makes sense on its own here.
> So I guess it's just not that important to me, overall, to use a convention that few people have ever used.
Yeah, lots of HN conventions each wouldn't matter if HN had one specific relevant formatting feature for the use case the convention addresses, but it doesn't, so we have the conventions we have.
You should try to to qualify that with the kind of writing you mean, because taken literally, that's a weird way to read anything. For instance, what is "the most important part" in War and Peace, or Song of Ice and Fire, that the reader should be able to find in 3 seconds?
Yes, much great writing is musical. But surely no composer of stout heart sets the stage using only one musical style, nor ask the same voice to sing every aria. Nor are all great works vocal.
Does it not make more sense for authors to explore the telling of tales through many voices in many rooms, and not just one?
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...
"Twain first tried dictating into Thomas Edison's new recording machine but didn't like it -- he was a man who strutted stages all over the world, delivering extemporaneous spiels. Twain needed a live audience to speak to, not a bloodless machine. He eventually found that audience in stenographer Josephine Hobby and author Albert Bigelow Paine, his first biographer. Paine says Twain often dictated from his bed, clad in a handsome silk dressing gown of rich Persian pattern, propped against great snowy pillows. He also got up, paced the floor and waved his arms as he poured out nearly 2,000 pages of typescript over three years."
https://www.npr.org/2010/12/01/131703237/on-publishing-mark-...
I try to follow this advice for important emails, and it helps a lot.
It is essential for writing YouTube comments - https://xkcd.com/481/.
It’s not (always) a word for word read, but after a few sessions of reading the newsletter out loud as I was recording, I noticed my writing has become more fluid and the content easier to digest (in my opinion, at least).
It was kind of hard (really, awkward) to read my own writing at first, but it got easier.
A really great tip!
Pay attention to speling, a grammar and Oxford commas.
Author presumably meant "emminently listenable" (a bit of a cliché but not heinous).
(Normally I wouldn't nitpick, but this is a post about writing and the mistake is in the 2nd paragraph so. Also, the tip is to read aloud.)
Are you sure this isn't a deliberate wordplay? A tiger ready to pounce on you in the jungle is an imminent danger; a great story read by a skilled voice actor is imminently listenable.
Also, you put the comma and period outside your double quotes. We computer programmers often do this, but this is incorrect in American English: the punctuation goes inside the double quotes. In British English the punctuation does indeed go outside the quotes unless the punctuation is actually being quoted, but the British use single quotes.[1]
American English: "Your color is changing," she said.
British English: `Your colour is changing', she said.
[1] https://www.thesaurus.com/e/grammar/does-punctuation-go-insi...
That’s not true, or at least it’s not what I was taught at my British primary school, and it’s not what you see people use. Maybe historically that’s true, I don’t know. The current British consensus is to use double quotes.
Sometimes you see single quotes in headlines when the author doesn’t want to imply that they’re making a direct quote
Apparently not, because the author has since corrected it.
> the British use single quotes.[1]
It's not that simple, because "the British" rather notoriously spread to many places. There are large ex-colony countries like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, where English is the primary language; and others where it's a major official language, like South Africa and India.
When it comes to rules like the ones you mention, they tend to vary because of varying degrees of American vs. British influence, as well as local variation; and of course, this all changes over time.
A better and more realistic treatment of the subject of punctuation in quotes can be found here: https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-pun1.htm
The "cliché internet objection to longer articles" can be valid in some cases. This is one of them. Plenty of other comments in this thread have pointed out the inherently blogspammy nature of the OP. It's a long, rambling piece with a clickbait title that wraps a tiny nugget of advice that may in any case be of limited applicability.
I'm a huge fan of long-form writing, like many of the articles one can find in e.g. The New Yorker, The Paris Review, etc. If this had been an article like that, then a snarky but biting dismissal might have been out of line. But the only thing the OP article has in common with those articles are its aspirations, which it failed to deliver on.
Responding to the form of a critical comment without considering the context is blind application of rules that doesn't help maintain the level of dialog. If we really wanted to apply effective moderation here, it should be to the OP article.
I still don't think you're reckoning with the cheapness of the snark.
Sounds like they were Worth their Words.
TL;DR no one wants to read your sh*t
But people don’t want to just read it because it’s there. They want to read it because they think they’ll get something out of it. If they think it will take too much effort, then they won’t want to read it.
Keep writing. Don’t just be a consumer of other people’s writing. Don’t say “I’ll never be Stephen King so what’s the point”. Keep writing. Even if people aren’t interested today, one day they will be.
Nobody wants to read your shit.
Let me repeat that. Nobody–not even your dog or your mother–has the slightest interest in your commercial for Rice Krispies or Delco batteries or Preparation H. Nor does anybody care about your one-act play, your Facebook page or your new sesame chicken joint at Canal and Tchopotoulis.
It isn’t that people are mean or cruel. They’re just busy.
Nobody wants to read your shit.
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