Some thoughts on writing
danluu.com
danluu.com
I'm a little surprised that Dan wrote this otherwise very nice post on writing and didn't mention the counterbalance to writing: reading. If you want to write, read a lot. My writing owes a lot to writers such as James Baldwin, Robert Caro, Calvin Trillin, etc. Specifically, read published works. I love reading a blog post as much as anyone else but there is a marked difference in quality between a blog post and a book or a high quality newspaper article.
One could argue that reading leads to aping but I disagree that aping is necessarily bad. Experts do not always have good ideas on how to teach because they understand the deep, universal theory and therefore think that everybody should learn from the deep, universal theory. In truth, beginners can't and won't learn deep theory. You have to start with imitating your tennis instructor's serve and then move onto the underlying concept of how a serve works. Complaining that beginners don't know the underlying theory and are just imitating is essentially complaining that beginners are beginners. Plus mimicry is a good way to learn. When I fenced, I remember that some fencers would mimic famous fencers as a joke. But it really did help them find their own style by letting them play with the different styles and think outside their own conventions.
Thus my advice: read a lot of books; imitate as much as you like; and write a lot.
Live life too. Experience how the others live. Always write from the heart.
In all honestly, I don't feel wealthy men can write well. Strike that last sentance. They can churn out sentences, but they are not interesting.
We suffer through their writing becacuse they are wealthy.
We feel they must have something inciteful to say because we equate wealth with talent.
I think every wealthy writer knows their best work was done when they were comming up, and almost always when they were poor, and struggling.
I can honestly say the only perk of being poor is you will be a good writer of you take the time to write something, or better than the wealthy man on his best day.
(I don't feel like a debate. It's just my opinion. And I'm sure you will find good writers that are financially well off, but they wern't always wealthy.)
body { margin: 0 auto; max-width: 50em; }
Although I must confess that I'm personally enjoying the quirky long lines in your writing.
If I have to resize the window then it will resize other tabs. If I need to put this in a different tab then it is kind of a hassle for a site that does not look that welcoming to me.
Probably there are some middle ground here.
I do keep lists of words and phrases, largely things that it occurs to me that this is the way to describe something I've been having trouble describing, but most of the time I'll keep working at a sentence until it says what I want the way I want it to.
But reading is absolutely essential, and reading to really understand the mechanics of how something works. Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer is a good introduction to how to do this.
I personally find the presentation clean and simple. Perfect for focusing on the content. Much better than most of the css&js loaded sites out there that restrict you a lot more.
1. Read a copy of On Writing by Stephen King
2. Write a lot
3. No, more than that
And always get feedback from your target audience. Publish, share, see what happens, adapt.
Still a good book overall though, don't get my wrong.
I've found reading lots, especially from revered authors from all nationalities, Steinbeck and Doestovsky I hold in great esteem, has had a great impact on my writing style.
I suppose we all try to emulate those we hold in esteem, and I think reading a lot from authors we like, can have a great influence in our ability to convey meaning through words.
I've updated the title now.
Having said that.... I frequently read his posts, and don't find his lack of space on the sides (or any other lack of style) prevents me from reading his blog posts.
Is there any specific reason why we feel this 'weirdness' from the lack of style beyond a built in expectation we all have about styling that we've seen in other sites?
The mf'ing website, though crude, makes some good points. I personally would far prefer if more sites looked like this.
Also, before someone comments. Yes I'm allowed to cuss on the internet. No I don't care if you cuss. Yes I'm allowed to not cuss on the internet.
- The styling and content on this website: I regularly get design folks and typographers telling me how stupid the design is, frequently in ways that become condescending very quickly if I engage with them
- - But, when I tested out switching to the current design from the generally highly lauded Octopress design, this one got much better engagement when a user landed on the site and also appeared to get passed around a lot more as well
- - When I've compared my traffic numbers to major coprorate blogs, my blog completely dominates most < $100B companies (e.g., it gets an order of magnitude more traffic than my employer's blog and my employer is a $50B company)
- - When I started my blog (and this is still true today), writing advice for programming blogs was to keep it short, maybe 500 to 1000 words. Most of my blog posts are 5000 to 10000 words.
What I’ve done with all of his posts is used reader mode in Safari.
I'm glad he uses minimal styling. Designs which look bad in normal view are usually fixed by reader view. Designs which look bad in reader view are probably completely unsalvagable.
>The "improve writing" goal is because I found my writing annoyingly awkward and wanted to fix that. I frequently wrote sentences or paragraphs that seemed clunky to me, like when you misspell a word and it looks wrong no matter how you try re-spelling it.
That's because your writing is so pedantically subdued that it doesn't resemble the ways that humans actually communicate.
What's particularly aggravating is that he knows, more or less, what clear, concise writing is (cf. his discussion of "classic style") and goes out of his way to not write like that. Yes, I read his justification. No, it's not good.
Someone is going to chime in by saying that I must be wrong because his articles frequently reach the HN frontpage. But correlation is not causation. The actual information content is generally really good – that's why they're popular. But they'd be even better with more attention to the mechanics of writing.
It's like a sonata where we have a favourite part. Why don't we just play that part?
This is not an argument against editing or improving the information density.
Regarding your second question, I don't feel I should be responsible for fixing the formatting mistakes of other people's websites.
I disagree. I like it as it is. Maybe a small amount of margin (HN-style) would help, but I certainly wouldn't want to see it introduce a maximum width.
> Regarding your second question, I don't feel I should be responsible for fixing the formatting mistakes of other people's websites.
I think websites should be created ready to be reflowed at the user's convenience - that's the whole point of using HTML over things like PDF. If the user wants a particular max-width, they should have their user agent apply it. Whereas if the website makes its own choice of max-width, it's virtually impossible for the user to "undo" that. (I did try setting "body max-width: undefined !important" in Stylish for a while, but that breaks too many pages)
If you don't agree with what I say, be polite and state why. If that's still to much of a bother, vote me down and move on... But flagging?! c'mon.
> This might be the most boring thing ever written about writing.
> The problem is (imo) that he's writing for himself and not an audience. It reads like a stream-of-consciousness journal entry, not a thoughtful attempt at relaying information to another mind. A good start would be learning to self-edit; the length could be cut significantly with no real loss of content.
> There isn't much more to this article than an author clarifying for himself how he thinks about things. He succeeds at that, sure, and is better off for it, but it's dreary for the rest of us!