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Comment by SkeuomorphicBee | Hacker News Reader

Reading this makes me angry at all my school teachers for the subjects of [my-native-language] and writing.

It is such a simple technique, that makes such a huge impact on ones writing, and yet no teacher bothered to teach it. I spent all my school years writing monotonous essays of five-word sentences. Week after week I would make another one, and I could clearly see for myself that they were bad, I just couldn't tell why. So when I asked my teachers for help, asking "what is wrong with my writing?", "what am I missing?", all I ever got back was a bad grade and the same useless tip: "just read more".

They might just as well have said to "draw the rest of the fucking owl."

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Reading more is the best way to learn though. Having good examples to imitate and build off of make writing clear, engaging prose much easier. When my math teachers told me "just do the practice problems", I also thought they were idiots, but they were actually right...

Reading more is good, but what if the teacher had pointed out the sentence length and told the student to start reflecting on sentence length while reading?

Outside of classroom-style dedicated instruction, this really does seem to be the best form of learning, i.e. a semi-active/not-fully-passive approach.

There is generally no "hack" that the student can use to avoid having to read a lot of stuff, in order to learn and especially to become an expert. What a student needs to read, isn't necessarily textbooks or the traditional orthodoxy of materials, but still there is undoubtedly a lot of reading that must be done, to "get good" as they say.

That being said, for a teacher to GUIDE that reading, to give some hints, pointers, themes, interconnections, sequencing (start with X, then read Y to deepen your knowledge of X), etc., is absolutely invaluable.

To me, this seems like the Pareto-optimal 80/20 breakdown, where 20% of the teacher's investment in time and energy can get you 80% of the benefit of having teaching at all (i.e. don't need a full curriculum or full-time commitment to dedicated instruction, but do need to spend some time/energy pointing the student in various directions and giving them some ideas to think about while reading).

This is all brushing up against the central theme of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", which approaches its core thesis by dissecting the process of teaching college students how to "write Quality".

Reading as a reader is kinda different than reading as a writer. Different mind states. As a reader I'm getting lost in a story, not picking up on writing styles and patterns. You're not wrong. Just need the caveat of reading with the intention (or partial intention) to pull yourself out of the story and check out the architecture.

> Reading more is the best way to learn though.

It’s useless advice to a student asking for specific help. A cooking student asking “why is my rice always soggy” should hear “let’s start by examining how much water you’re using”, not “watch more cooking shows until you understand through osmosis”.

The point of a teacher is to teach. If the only guidance they can muster is “consume more of what you’re trying to create”, there’s no point to having a class.

Yes, not everyone can notice the important element of what they're witnessing, especially not a novice.

I've seen a lot of baseball and golf, and I still don't know how to even try to swing those things properly.

> When my math teachers told me "just do the practice problems", I also thought they were idiots, but they were actually right...

Reading more would be reading problems. Doing practice problems is equivalent to writing and having someone/something point out if it's good or not.

This is a problem with most advice on English writing. They only teach you how to write as at a level that a 8 years old reader would understand. Most modern books, fiction or not, are written at a juvenile level, at the formal request of publishers. As a result, the level of reading and comprehension for most people has decreased to a level that is lower than in any other literate society.

> they only teach you how to write as at a level that a 8 years old reader would understand.

Many if not most modern writing advice will remind you to focus on your audience. Most audiences aren't composed of eight year olds. So it isn't true that most advice suggests writing for eight year olds.

> As a result, the level of reading and comprehension for most people has decreased to a level that is lower than in any other literate society.

We track statistics like reading comprehension and you can look them up. I did. The source I found showed that every state in the US I checked - with the exception of Michigan (??) - has reading comprehension improve relative to the year 2003. In some cases this improvement is by a notable amount, in some cases not so notable.

It seems unlikely to me that people now are worse at reading and writing than people used to be. Writing is more common now and reading is more common too. Once, journalists wrote. Now everyone does.

>So it isn't true that most advice suggests writing for eight year olds.

That may be true although I can tell you from personal experience that writing optimizers for places like trade press sites absolutely push you towards more basic language, shorter sentences, etc. One site in particular I used to write for sometimes told me every single time that I should basically dumb down my prose. And I don't write in a particularly literary way and I've pretty much never had this feedback from human editors.

>Once, journalists wrote. Now everyone does.

Interesting observation. At one point, most business people above a certain level were "writing" by dictating to their secretaries which is a completely different mode of getting information onto a page.

I believe you. Medium is the message is a term from media theory. It refers to the idea that messages aren't in a vacuum, but are shaped by where they are transmitted. Often that shape is a function of what the audience will find appealing. You can tie this sort of thing to bellman equations to get a mathematical grip on the effect.

It does exist. It can be as harmful as you think it is. Yet it isn't harmful everywhere - isn't the world at large without any variation. It is intimately tied to the environment you are in, because that environment produces the rewards. Different environment, different reward, different impact on your writing. The effect is local, not global.

Which means you get to have a superpower.

When you have a bad transformation that degrades thinking that makes the term "medium is the message" feel dangerous. So you get things like Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. I think your post is an example of the same type of fear. This focus - on the examples of times where things are negative - it misses the opportunity. Since messages are a function not of raw ideas, but of their audiences you have an incredible power. Choose the right audience. Set the expectation for evaluation in advance. Pick the medium that helps you to think clearly and makes it easy to be judged. Now, instead of being destroyed by your incentive environment, you get empowered by it.

Take a look at Amazon's writing culture for an example of that. Or more broadly, the many companies which chose to ban powerpoint for reasons which are fundamentally related to what I'm talking about. We're not worse at understanding writing than ever before. We're more advanced than ever before, because we stand atop the giants that came before us. Yet at the same time - we're not, because that too is local and not global. The future is often already here, but isn't evenly distributed.

I think you’re both making good points in this thread. I’m writing a non-fiction book in my spare time, and I’ve had to face the fact that my default get-words-on-the-page is extremely flowery.

Would it be possible for you share an example of your prose that received this criticism?

Basically anything here had the Wordpress plug-in whining:

https://www.techtarget.com/contributor/Gordon-Haff

And that's probably after I made a few token changes to make the plug-in happier.

Very interesting, thanks for sharing.

Some people are going to respond "reading more is the right thing to do".

As in: practice makes perfect. Observing a master, will make you a master.

But unless your eye or brain can detect what they're doing, it can feel hopeless.

Sometimes having it broken out like this really helps. I found this amazing too!

So really, perfect practice makes perfect. Or at least saves time and avoids forming bad habits along the way.

I’m curious, what language/country was that?

as they say: those who can't do, teach

That is five words long.

So is that, my friend.

That too! Imagine the chances!

They = idiots

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