Editing Means Writing Less | Hacker News Reader

Editing Means Writing Less

bramadams.dev

24 points_bramses20 comments

Ironically, this does not respect the reader's time. Takes 12 clicks to read through all the points, and I still don't know what the colors mean, why the nodes are connected the way they are, or what it's trying to convey. The default layout also makes the graph look more complex than it really is; there's no reason for edges to overlap.

I think graphs are fun, so I made a graph ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I was coming here to post similar sentiments. :)

* "Respect the time of your readers, and respect your message!"

* "The Art of Writing Less and Saying Basically The Same Thing [sic - that's not even a complete sentence]"

* "Don't say anything more than you need to / Revision 1: Don't say more than needed / Revision 2: Say only what's needed"

* "If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter"

* "Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."

* "When revising, pretend to be your own worst enemy. Is there anything that can be misunderstood? If so, change it so that it can’t!"

I'm confused about whether the author read this advice and chose to ignore it by repeating it 6 (or, 5 times, and alluded to it with a sentence fragment), or whether this is some self-aware-meta-I-know-the-rules-but-I'm-ignoring them, or what's going on here.

It's a half truth that editing makes your writing more concise. First drafts have sloppy sentences that need to be trimmed or removed entirely. But proper editing also reveals where you've assumed too much or your argument is weak, and fixing those problems requires more words, not fewer. When I see a writer whose prose is too fluid, my instinct is to ask what's left out.

Yeah. For something that has to be just right in a limited number of words (ad copy, the introduction to a product or the company on your website, etc. you'll write a whole lot and throw out a lot. (And fiction is presumably a whole different ball game.)

But your typical article or blog post? Much less technical docs? As you say, you'll clean up a lot of sloppy sentences (at least I do), maybe decide something is too much of a diversion, maybe decide your long winded lead-in really needs to get to the point, and probably add text to clarify some things or bulletproof them. (When I wrote research notes I loved footnotes for this purpose.)

By and large, I'm not doing a big word dump and then cutting half of it.

Editing means writing more—it just means publishing less. Instead of writing 1000 words, you write 1500 and delete 1000 of them.

I agree to an extent--mostly upfront "throat clearing" and sometimes there's a section that just doesn't fit or becomes tangential as a piece develops. But for day to day writing, which I do a lot of, the 1200 words or so I put down is mostly going to get little nips and tucks rather than a lot of wholesale cuts. YMMV of course.

Yeah I'm exaggerating a bit to prove a point, but even so, each nip and tuck is an new sentence fragment written and an old sentence fragment discarded. The more you edit, the smaller the ratio of what you publish to what you wrote.

Fair enough. But I do this sort of thing all the time and--assuming I have a clear topic in mind and the supporting material (big caveats which can take quite a bit of time)--banging out a thousand word article is certainly less than a day process. And, yes, while a fair number of words change or change positions or get reworded, that sort of essentially copy-editing is mostly stuff I can do in my sleep.

Those snippets could be less than half a page of simple text, instead it's a confusing graph requiring JS just to tell me ironic things like:

> Is there anything that can be misunderstood? If so, change it so that it can’t!

Disagreed. These are the end goals, but the very first step is to write as many words as possible. Editing is cutting what's there to something that actually works -- cleaning up.

Why is this idea presented with... physics-governed vertices on a graph?

There's a certain irony to a blog post about concise writing that uses this much JS and CSS to display a few quotes.

It’s unclear to me what is the benefit of presenting the information like this.

Meh, I do a lot of technical writing. Documents are very dry to read.

For non technical writing, I really enjoy additional words that invoke emotions.

It means writing the same amount and revising into more clear/concise statements.

I don't get it.

I feel I was "pranked" by my "reading French for grad students" instructor. Assigned was a discursively long letter by Pascal to translate. The initial excitement of getting to read some Pascal wore thin as the letter went on and on and on. All was forgiven when I got to the end and read for myself the source of the famous "Sorry this letter was so long; I didn't have time to write a shorter one" (or something to that effect -- it's one of the nodes in the graph).

That was a great lesson on several levels.

Pascal's letter was an info dump, not a concise expression of an idea he wanted to convey. In editing, you start with the info dump and remove the unnecessary until you have clear simple statement of the ideas. All of this takes work, and mainly culls the unessential from the info dump.

Maybe the point of the page, is that the ideas have been culled, distilled into a simple little graph, resulting in even less writing?

> Assigned was a discursively long letter by Pascal to translate. The initial excitement of getting to read some Pascal wore thin as the letter went on and on and on.

You should write a letter to Niklaus Wirth complaining to him for making such a long programming language.

Lol. Haven't worked with Pascal, but writing James Gosling crossed my mind once or twice ;-)

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