Write More, but Shorter
blog.kewah.com
blog.kewah.com
I've published a blog post every weekday for over a year now (today's was #280). It's been life changing for me. It's now my go-to method for figuring out what I think about something and for crystallizing those thoughts and finding links between them.
- I figured out that I wanted a new job while writing a blog post (and I started that new job 9 months ago).
- I learned that I'm not an introvert, but rather a shy extrovert, while writing a blog post.
- That led into me realizing I have social anxiety while writing a blog post.
There are lots more examples of that. I'm often surprised to find that I don't actually believe what I thought I believed when I started writing that blog post.
Journaling never stuck for me because it felt like work, but making it public made it exciting and fulfilling enough to become a habit that I look forward to each day.
Since the author mentioned Zettelkasten, I'll add this: https://critter.blog/2021/02/10/blogging-as-a-zettelkasten/
[1] https://giansegato.com/essays/edutainment-is-not-learning/
I've lately been contemplating whether writing shorter content regularly is better than writing long thoughtful content once in a while. Your work gives some motivation.
I have some questions,
1. How do you differentiating writing short content on social media vs your blog, Because If I have anything short to communicate I do so HN, Twitter, Reddit and so If I have to write about it again on my blog it feels bit disingenuous.
I saw your twitter handle and it looks like you're using just for broadcasting your content? Aren't you worried that you'd be caught in a bubble? Social media for what it's worth are good source for counter thought, Though often it's in the form of harsh criticisms.
2. SEO: How are the Search Engines treating your blogs for the small content length? I see that my long writes have been favored by the search engines. Did you see having images/videos in your content making difference?
3. Would you like to reveal your opening rates of your newsletter email? I'm curious whether shorter content results in decent open rates(While the average industry rate for newsletter is abysmal, Yet I do recommend everyone to have their own newsletter as it's the only thing which can save your blog if the Search Engine gods decides to shadow ban. Federated email for the win again!)
1. I don't really use social media. My blog posts auto-post to Twitter and LinkedIn, and that's the extent of my social media engagement. I don't follow anyone on Twitter, for example. Sometimes people will email me if they feel strongly about a post. But for the most part, I solve for being "caught in a bubble" using a small Slack community I'm a part of, where some friends and former coworkers pick apart my blog posts and point out how stupid they are :)
2. I'm not really sure. I don't pay much attention to SEO since the traffic doesn't matter much to me. Don't get me wrong, I get a thrill when something I write makes the rounds and people seem to like it, but not enough to worry about optimizing for it.
3. I just use the built in Wordpress email subscription feature, which doesn't provide any open rates. I only have ~150 email subscribers anyway, and my blog itself only gets 100-150 views a day. In general, I've done basically no marketing for it outside of that I used to post a lot of them to HN until the domain got shadow banned.
> I used to post a lot of them to HN until the domain got shadow banned.
This is interesting, Did you come to this conclusion because your articles didn't come to front page or did you measure through analytics immediately after posting?
It makes sense - I spammed only my blog daily for months. I'm not complaining!
Fun, I recently had the same revelation while driving. I realized that making new social connections or talking in public was frightening, but that I had no problem anymore overcoming those fears, and that they were fears, not something that defines me as an introvert.
Generally, if you're writing long, rambling posts, there's a good chance that your understanding of the subject that you're writing about is sloppy (not to say you don't understand it, just that your thoughts are all over the place). If you can express what you're writing in a fairly short amount of time, you probably have a relatively good mental model of what it is you're tying to say, and this is a learnable (and useful) skill.
I've found that getting into the practice of writing "notes that I will actually read in the future" has helped a lot with this.
It's okay to write long. But it needs to feel short by being concise.
You can always tell when someone squeezes a 1000 page book into 200 pages. It feels short and insightful. But when they expand a 20 page book into 200 pages, it feels like fluff. You can tell when that happens too.
A good pattern to observe is an author's first and second best seller.
The first is often amazing. A decade of lessons and insights squeezed into a book. The fast followup is usually fluff. 2 years of add-ons expanded into a full book.
Obviously there are subjects where it would be extremely difficult (if not impossible) to express in a short format, and obviously if it requires it, then take the amount of space that you need. I think the goal should be "aim for brevity, but be clear."
One of my favorite examples of this are Ron Pressler's "TLA+ in Practice and Theory" posts. It's four extremely long blog posts, but it contains what feels like multiple textbooks' worth of information in there. By comparison to how long it could be, I think it's incredible how concise it is.
I disagree with this argument. You can most certainly tell when someone is trying to squeeze too much into a too small of a space. The sentences are dense and the information density prohibits actually gleaning anything.
Each tweet in the thread is often accompanied by a link and/or screen shot of a refernce article or book so I can dive into more source material if I wish... just perfect
Comprehensive analysis of World War 2? Tens of thousands of words would be too short.
Explaining to a friend why you didn't like the movie you just watched? Keep it under a paragraph.
It has a lot tondonwith whether you tried to learn writing, found good teachers or other resources. Learning to write won't make your thinking different, but you will be able to express things.
I am sure he didn't originate the sentiment but
“Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard." -- David McCullough
(Interview with NEH chairman Bruce Cole, Humanities, July/Aug. 2002, Vol. 23/No. 4)”
This is precisely what I strongly disagree with.
You don't have to write to think and trying to is often detrimental. You can use writing to think, in situations where it helps or if you want to.
But it is not necessary and don't necessary improves your thinking.
And writing for you to understand is different then writing for others.
I think the better way overall though is just to try different methods of thinking and do what works for you. I also think more than one method is almost always better than just using one.
Writing is bad because it needs to fit in a human head and ultimately needs to be spoken by a human mouth. Maths is bad because it is still stuck as being written on blackboards or pen and paper if you're unlucky.
The few times I have build up these dsls formally have let me understand a topic both more deeply and remember it more easily. The downside is that time invested in inventing it in the first place. E.g.
(for-all x (implies
(member x integers)
(exist-unique y
(and (member y integers)
(equal? 0 (+ x y))))))
I'm not saying that you should be the next Robert Penn Warren or James Joyce if you're writing about an endofunctor or something, but I genuinely do think that learning how to write fairly well has actually made me understand mathematics and computer science better, in addition to becoming better at explaining it. My thoughts can be all over the place, and even if I know every single "fact" about a subject, I feel like writing about it (and in particular trying to write well about it) helps me fully realize how these facts actually relate to each other, and building a bigger mental picture that I might not otherwise have.
To be clear, I don't think writing is the only way of doing this. I think, for example, getting good at data visualization or learning formal mathematics can also have similar effects in regards to most forms of engineering. I just think that getting good at writing about a subject is a one of many really useful tools for developing an understanding of a subject.
Forcing yourself to interact with concepts in different ways improves understanding, definitely.
This doesn’t say that being able to teach or write well about a topic correlates with understanding. Understanding is an effect of writing not the other way around.
The thought is clear in my head, but doesn't seem clear on paper. So I just throw a bunch of word spaghetti at the wall and hope something sticks. It's better to tighten up one really clear sentence, and accept any complex thought will probably go over the heads of some percent of the readers.
Some strategies that worked better for me are:
- To ask them to rephrase/re-explain. This is best when the other party tends to get the general idea but misses key details. You can then fill these key details into their explanation, and they will stick much better.
- To formulate follow-up questions. This is best to explore whether they got the general idea right. If they do, they will be able to infer some simple conclusions/consequences of what you just explained.
- To get them to finish the next sentence. This is best to pace yourself during the explanation itself. When they can't see what comes next, it should either be an important revelation or you are going too fast.
On the other hand, in my own experience, if it's possible that I forgot to mention something and try to tack on the information, it's also quite likely that I lost oversight, that the information was already coded in and I just forgot and thus repeat myself.
For example, I do frequently lose drafts by accident, and I'm particularly happy when I manage to reformulate approximately the same structure, but it has also been the case that I could not even remember what I was going to say. Some other times, I just completely lose it, so to speak, and butcher everything with deranged copy-pastes rearranged in the wrong place. Now my conclusion has been for a long time that this is simply due to a poor working memory, quite analogous to the browser crashes eating my drafts. On the up-side, the aphasia is self-healing to a degree, so I find it is a good memory training when I have to formulate a text before I can get to the writing, but the extent of my abilities is severely limited at that. Inasmuch as this is analogous to the thought process itself, the writing is symptomatic. However, there are also those cases where my thought process was not verbose, so translating from idetic memory to linear text is a huge problem, for example with regards to conjunctions.
On that point you will note if you have ever written involved if-then-else structures, that repition and redundancy is impossible to avoid. Conversely though, recursive algorithms and functional data-structures that do look neat on paper do potentially have much worse run-time complexity, depending on the interpreter, for lack of a better word. More over, to stick with the programming metaphor, text may contain comments on a meta level, but we've all seen those useless comments and unhelpful documentation.
Anyhow, what I was hoping to say was that redundancy has benefits. Scientific papers do it all the time and possibly on purpose. This is in no small part due to the medium. Locality matters, so in dialog you might be told where something was left unclear, or already known, and responses might serve redundancy for you, but in writing maybe there is the expectation of certain conventions. Legal writing, verdicts and such are another fine example of elaborate structure with sometimes staggering amounts of repitition.
Finally, keeping the Title in mind, the itterative method you describe can count as "write more", and if it works like play generally does it will improve and the conclusion will actually be "but shorter" on average. Whereas, if the itterations tend to grow longer, it might be indicative of a lack of understanding indeed.
If you sieve through their rambling, you'll notice that they do have a mental model. The problem is that the model is very foreign to other minds, and they do a poor job describing it.
This might be the reason that some people are more comfortable communicating with formulas than verbal descriptions. They are eloquent when they don't have to come up with their own words.
In short: I agree that rambling may have more to do with the difficulty of translation than the internal understanding.
Formulas are great at the level of expressing that a table was moved, which is the important piece for some.
That it misses the human element of the feelings surrounding the event is a different kind of eloquence from flowery prose to entertain.
The world is very complex and almost nothing in it can accurately be summarised in a short piece of writing. Being able to making decent summaries is useful but it doesn't show mastery of the subject nor does being unable to do so show lack of mastery. Rather many masters feels that the summaries are woefully inaccurate and therefore be unable to write them while many amateurs will make very clear summaries of fields they understand nothing about.
That begs the question, are consciousness and qualia constrainted by some forms of languages too? How can we go about describing these constraints? It is perhaps only when we are able to outline them that we'll discover greater truths about languages (e.g. as we conduct experiments to verify our models on consciousness).
There's some tension between correctness and clarity. Both come in degrees, and writing in the top right quadrant is rare. But holding correctness fixed, I think OP (and Feynman) are right that they go together -- ie Corr(correctness, clarity | correctness) is very high.
(In the general case, though, you may be right. Corr(correctness, clarity) is often negative. But one is a bit more important than the other... simple sentences are a dime a dozen. It's the true ones we care about; only then does clarity enter.)
There, I have been both correct and concise. However, I have not been complete.
You are both wrong is still true, but it is not the whole truth and the whole truth depends on the audience and also your intent.
My intent is to make a tongue in cheek point (no offense meant to the parent and gp). The audience you have little control of but you can write with a particular one in mind.
And to elaborate slightly on why your both wrong. It's because you left out the third c - completeness. This will change depending on your audience and what kind of story your are telling.
I don't think that's true. Understanding something and being able to write about it are two different things. It's a good thing to learn to be concise though.
Good writing is often a very small subset of a topic. If you are an expert on a topic it can be very hard to omit a lot of detail you may find important but will just overload people.
Toastmasters taught me a lot about this. A lot of my speeches were 15 minutes long at first. Cutting them down to 5 minutes was very painful but it definitely made them way better
https://web.archive.org/web/20160731175038/http://www.guindo...
I love this quote.
That made me realize, keeping dyslexic people in mind when writing is one of those things that improves accessibility for everyone.
That said, this only works up to a point, and I wonder whether most articles could be written in bullets and retain all the "value" of their prose form. Bullets don't cut it if the subject requires the author to address human emotions or impart meaning into their text. This is loosely in opposition to facts, spec sheets, and technical information that does lend itself to hierarchical structures in a way that adds value.
I recognize you might not disagree with any of this, by the way.
Other things are very difficult to convey, type systems, multiple levels of interpretation, multiple levels of VMs and runtimes, and things that are spread out over time or inter-related in complex ways.
One thing your dyslexic friend may have is a lack of context and bullet points are the fastest way to a) build context and b) provide roots to be able to hang more information off of.
tl;dr both.
I found that when trying to communicate actual information, prose just gets in the way. Trees (aka. nested bullet points) map much better. Alas, most people are used to reading prose, so I'm forced to degrade the message to accommodate.
- The piece is written to make a good story, not to convey facts. I tend not to like these myself. But asking them to consist of bullet points would be like saying that Romeo and Juliet should consist of a bullet list of the plot points: it misses the point.
- It's SEO spam, or a submarine ad, or a blog post about something the author makes money on, or a post by Wolfram obstensively talking about one thing but actually mostly talking about how great Wolfram is, and the objective of the writer is best achieved if you spend a while reading it.
- It's a recipe. I don't know exactly what's going on, but judging by the effects there are some really weird incentives around online recipes.
For writing that actually aims to impart knowledge, agreed: bullet lists are great (even for non-dyslexic readers) and we should use more of them.
Looking at Mike's article:
> Because the shorter it is, the more people will read it.
What.
> Because of the Pareto principle: 80% of the value is in 20% of the length (hence “5x shorter”).
WHAT.
I guess a lot of us write so that other people will read...I guess.
But also, a lot of us write to exorcise our informational/emotional demons (to use a metaphor). It's taking care of oneself. And a lot of the time that looks like piles of words. Especially given a nice amount of intuition-stimulant like caffeine.
Writing/blogging has headed more this way for me personally, the longer I've been writing & blogging. But I also don't blog for leads or income anymore, and don't care as much about my audience dynamics. Is that where the cutoff is?
If somebody really wants the short version I find that they'll email me and probably get a disappointing reply...
I find in my old age that I have little patience for people who publicly write for themselves and not for others. If you want to masturbate, cool, I love it, do it in private. If you want to enrich others, the less you waste their time the more people you'll be able to reach.
It’s very obvious when it comes up in my feeds that people are doing it to appeal to their managers and review committee.
We are in no way a leader in analytics, so I feel bad for those who consume this content, which is put out by people with 3-6 months of professional experience who are trying to pass it off as authoritative and universal.
It's not like web pages spontaneously run into your home and throw themselves in your face. Simply publishing a blog to the web for those who happen to seek it out lets the audience themselves decide what is public what is private.
The audience still has complete control over the use of their own time.
So are advertisements posted on the street outside your house.
Those take up physical space and a region of my visual field, which are both finite resources in ways that the web is clearly not.
I think most journaling falls under this category -- there is a reason it is called a "brain dump", heh.
Scott Adams https://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/06/the...
It's a good rule of thumb to KISS (keep it short and simple), but it doesn't translate from one short and simplified example to each sentence of a longer text, because sentences aren't wholly individual. Sentences need to work together, in conjunction, because the information content requires a reasonable amount of structural complexity to support the content. Adverbs are very good at that.
I am absoluty not familiar with typed syntax theories or anything really, but I dare say the adverb in the previous sentence modifies at that. At least the parameter is bracketed nicely. Were I to say otherwise that Adverbs are good, it would not be any better now would it? Because the adverb introduces an adverbial clause that modifies the whole preceding text, that is referenced by "at that" in a manner of, err, a fix-point y-combinator!?
On the other hand I am a foreign speaker without good judgement. Consider that good (or happy) itself may be adverbial, Adverbs well support the support.
Good to know: Repition and redundancy can be quite beneficial, and sometimes it's impossible to avoid.
Anyway, kitchen philosophy says that early optimization is the source of all evil (Hoare apud Knuth).
Edit: Another problem of structural support is punctuation
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.
I'm more accustomed to the view of writing as expression, though perhaps this is old fashioned. The post-modern engineering view where writing is a crude function seems both totalitarian and impoverished to me. Just look at how every comment in this chajn has explained writing: in the most imperial, imperative way. Thou shalt's and shall-not's, commandment and algorithm.
To take your example, don't say "he was very happy", but say something like "he was ecstatic".
Interestingly, I heard it from some actor being interviewed on the Howard Stern show.
For last ~year or so, I've been trying to get more into the habit of keeping my emails extremely utilitarian, e.g. bullets of my questions, bullets of what I need, and maybe the best way to get ahold of me.
Nowadays I try to get to the point about what I want from the other person, while giving just enough context at the start to frame the request. It has definitely helped in getting a response or action.
Whereas whenever I see a long article, it's typically because the author decided to ramble about everything, nothing, and their dog, before they even get to anything remotely related to their point, by which point I've already lost the will to live. Not to mention I suspect they do this increase adspace, and then feel cheated I was tricked into clicking in the first space.
But a well reasoned argument need not be short to be effective. Orwell's essays do not need cliffnotes in order to be appreciated. CS Lewis does not need it.
So I would replace "short" with "intentional", "structured", "respectful" ... I think it just happens that it's easier to be unstructured and disrespectul during longer rants than it is with shorter ones.
https://critter.blog/2020/10/02/write-5x-more-but-write-5x-l...
I've decided to do all business correspondence as haiku from here on.
--------
Regarding your code
I would replace all the tabs
With happy faces
I realized that I have always enjoyed blogging. A medium that encourages terseness, has minimal friction to post, and provides a decently-sized audience lets me talk about my life in a way that makes me choose words more carefully.
Simple ideas can be conveyed clearly and concisely.
Complex ideas need space to grow, roam, demonstrate, and explain. But more critically (and something Zettlekasten should help with significantly) they require structure. John McFee's description of his use of index cards is among the best (and most concise) explanations of this that I've found.
A classic bit of bad writing advice I see, at least for someone trying to express complex thoughts, is the idea that writing only or simply requires adding some fixed number of words per day. Write a uniform 3,000 words per day, and you'll crank out a 250,000 word epic novel in three months. It ... doesn't work like that. It's not that you can't simply keep stringing words together. But eventually that's going to show.
Simple structures are simple. A box, or hut, or short program, or simple essay, can be stream of consciousness or happenstance. A more complex structure with interdependencies, relationships, and constraints requires more thought, a framework off of which to hang the parts, and an overall organisation.
Short fragments can give you the parts you're looking for, but you'll still need to fit them together. And apply tape, string, and mortar where needed as well.
why is that bad writing advice? I would expect that consistently developing the writing every day (aka, 3000 words per day) will lead to some results - of course, you'd still have to edit, rearrange, and cut at some point in the future (e.g., after the "full" novel is completed, you'd go back and repeatedly change and cut, until it's a good novel).
- Write X words/day.
- After nX days, book of nX length!!!
There is advice that that addresses that. The John McFee piece I reference is one.
A writing guide book I'd used at uni had a chapter on rewriting. It consisted of something like this:
Rewriting
Interviewer: I understood you rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms 16 times. What was the hard part?
Hemmingway: Getting the words right.
The author was Hemmingway. The book and number of rewrites may have differed. I'm near certain the response was as I've given it. That was the entire chapter. It is an effective communication.
There's a similar brand of reading advice that's similarly bad --- that you just have to plough through a book, keep reading, and make sure you understand each word.
Again: Thats. Not. How. It. Works.
There's context, references, allusion, cultural relevance.
Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a Book addresses this complexity, as a contrast.
It's not that you don't need to actually write to produce something, but just as a house is not a pile of bricks, and a skyscraper isn't a pile of concrete, glass, and steel, a book isn't simply a pile of words. The advice is very incomplete.
And inevitably, some people have since said that my mails should come with a TL;DR! Sure enough, I feel like I used to be succinct, and now I'm just overly verbose, with redundant sentences, and sometimes seemingly rambling.
Hell, if you made it this far through this rambling comment, well done ;)
Wolfram has an.. issue in that he focuses on qualitative results (he runs simulations, eyeball it and tell something about it), but, I'm pretty excited by this development.
https://www.wolframphysics.org/
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/04/the-wolfram-phys...
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-h...
That's a good way of describing his weakness!
His excitement about some experiment is directly proportional to:
1) the interestingness of some unproven result,
2) that he imagines is proven based on his personal inductive overgeneralization,
3) of a perceived qualitative result,
4) from an actual quantitative experiment,
5) that he post-selected for said interestingness,
6) and that he claims to have discovered first.
He has good ideas, but it seems to always be wrapped up in huge amounts of meta hyperbole.
If you can't connect the beginning, middle and end of a single 3000 word article, why do you think you can do it with 5x 600 word ones? Same for video and audio.
Plus, "more and shorter" brought us the cancer that is Twitter, Facebook, Imgur and TikTok.
Write shorter.
Get more clicks.
Profit!
I stopped reading as soon as the first pop-up toolbar appeared.
So now, I summarize articles into notes which both helps me and others. Also, no one really reads any more, at least in my circle.
Most of my long form content has been converted into checklists, slides and diagrams.
In fact it looks like the process for writing good articles and writing good code is not so different.
Each word should be meaningful and precise. Text has to be short but without resorting to obscure abbreviations and references. Of course spelling, syntax and formatting has to be correct.