The day you became a better writer (2007)
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My understanding was that that words are typically ordered differently in other languages, is that true? That would seem to disprove the idea that "all brains work this way" (although it may be how the brains of native english speakers work).
I'm trying to piece whether this would be anicdotal evidence for or against the previous statement of
> All brains work that way.
Since there are many ways this could be occuring, would you say that you are ... • putting the 2nd language in the order of your native language (or opposite) • putting word order in active voice (or passive) regardless of which language you are speaking • or putting the words in the order of whichever language has been dominate at the time. Like if you are somewhere where you mostly have been speaking Language A, and suddenly switch to Language B, you accidentally use Language A grammar
It's something along the lines of the third case, but there are also cases where a word by word translation is going on when I'm trying to express concepts I've learned in a language into the other.
Wikipedia says that 96% of studied human languages, covering over 99% of the population, have the subject before the object [0].
So it may not be an absolute, but there does seem to be something fundamental about subject-object being the more natural order.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject%E2%80%93verb%E2%80%93o...
Well, first, the quoted extract is referring to the subject of the sentence as "the object", which is a terrible mistake to make - the claim is incomprehensible unless you pay attention to what should be a superfluous example. It is very common for languages to put objects before verbs by default, but not in English.
Most potential word orders are attested in some language or other. Creoles (new languages that don't develop from ancestors) are usually subject-verb-object, which is evidence that supports the idea that that word ordering is more natural. Creoles can develop that word ordering even when no language in the local environment uses it.
As further support for SVO order being "more natural", you can also observe that it seems to have spontaneously developed in the major trade languages. Latin was SOV; French, Spanish, and Italian are SVO. Most Chinese languages are SOV today, but Mandarin is SVO. (So is Cantonese. Old English, unfortunately for this line of thought, seems to have already been SVO by the time it's documented.)
All languages feature ways to rearrange the words in a sentence.[1] The reason it's an option in English to say "the ball was hit by the boy" is that you might be talking about the ball. A text written entirely in the active voice is going to end up being much harder to understand than a natural text, specifically because using that style will prevent you from organizing your ideas correctly. The call to "learn how brains organize ideas" is misguided puffery.
[1] Active/passive is kind of an impoverished way to do this, though English does also support topic fronting. In Mandarin there's a three-way syntactic split between SVO ("active"), O被SV ("passive"), and S把OV (with 把 being a "preposition marking the direct object").
As noted by others in this thread, the active voice puts the focus on the actor, i.e. the grammatical subject. This lends the construction vigor. The passive voice, which puts the focus on the grammatical object, is weak and even dull by comparison.
As well, by diminishing the actor, the passive voice can serve to evade responsibility and accountability: "The campaign finance rules were violated by the senators." rather than the more pointed "The senators violated the campaign finance rules." This convenient effect explains the prevalence of the passive voice in bureaucratic prose, which was Orwell's particular bête noire.
The active voice is also less "wordy," which improves the vigor of the style. In the example I just gave, the word count is 9 versus 7. I achieved the lower count by removing an auxiliary verb ("were") and a preposition ("by").
Now, I could have written the previous sentence like this: "The lower count was achieved by removing an auxiliary verb . . ." etc. Here the passive voice is probably preferred, because the actor, "I", is not of significance, and may even distract.
The passive voice does have its uses, hence the caveat "whenever feasible" in the first sentence above.
I try to be much more mindful when I have real intent & want things done. But so much writing is an attempt to communicate unclear things, to explore, not convince. I have a hard time believing writing like this produces the things I like to read.
The Day You Became a Better Writer by Scott Adams - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13953775 - March 2017 (4 comments)
The Day You Became a Better Writer (2007) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13673276 - Feb 2017 (1 comment)
Simple means getting rid of extra words. Don’t write, “He was very happy” when you can write “He was happy.” You think the word “very” adds something. It doesn’t. Prune your sentences.
By this logic, most popular writers and bloggers not be as successful as they are, such as Moldbug. Simple , strait-forward writing does not mean more successful, viral writing. If you're writing a how-to guide or an investment pitch, maybe simple is better, but expository writing does not need to be simple
1. Keep sentences short.
2. Use appropriate vocabulary.
3. Engage your audience with a captivating beginning.
4. Prefer active voice.