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Comment by foxbarrington | Hacker News Reader

The tip: read your writing out loud.

Thanks. It felt like I was trying to find how long to cook something and at what temperature and instead the author is only interested in telling me about their grandmother's sweaters and childhood summers in Vermont.

You nailed it. That's precisely how I felt.

I made this Chrome extension to help skip to the recipe on those long-winded sites. Someone on here years ago encouraged me to build it!

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...

I half expected it to be, "Add credibility signifiers like 'I learned this at Oxford' to your headlines."

Another tip I learned early on: "Don't bury the lede."

lede?

I’ve also closed my eyes and used a computer’s text-to-speech capability. I find this helpful when my writing is fresh and I’m apt to be reading as much from memory as with my eyes.

Yes I'm doing that all the time. There is no good TTS on Linux so I often have to use online tools. I need to try some of the cloud providers TTS systems, their demo sound great.

I was taught that writing and speaking are very different you tend to speak much differently than you'd write. Maybe that was bad advice.

Indeed: it seems (according to TA Eliot) that Henry James dictated his latest novels to a typist (or something similar) and that accounts for the density and lack of freshness (also of his revises edition of his works, which he did in his old age).

Mark Twain dictated some 2,000 pages for his autobiography.

"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-...

You do, but the goal here isn't to write the way you speak, it's to force a different engagement with your own writing than you would get otherwise. This page from the UNC writing center gives a better explanation: https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/reading-aloud/

I try to follow this advice for important emails, and it helps a lot.

I'd say writing that's like your speech without filler words and backtracking to rephrase what you just said can make for remarkably great prose.

PG has some interesting thoughts about this: http://www.paulgraham.com/talk.html

If you write on a computer, printing the essay in a different font/color/line spacing, and reading it, also works.

I suspect that that may have been the case for people who grew up without and don’t primarily communicate with the internet, people whose writing style is mainly shaped by a school syllabus, but nowadays I’d guess that that’s falling away, to an extent

I can corroborate; I've been writing long-form for years, and somewhere along the way I began releasing my works as podcast episodes. There have been many occasions where I didn't recognize problems until I was recording the narration.

Yep, thanks, tried scanning it to find the but of advice. Failed:)

I read this comment out loud

Thank you.

It might be useful for writing essays.

It is essential for writing YouTube comments - https://xkcd.com/481/.

Saved me a click

Hero!

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