How to edit your own lousy writing (2017) | Hacker News Reader

How to edit your own lousy writing (2017)

stingingfly.org

174 pointsCuriositry72 comments

The mathematician Gauss said, "You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length."

This is what almost everyone on the internet gets wrong these days, especially writers on medium and other blogging platforms, but also writers on the BBC and the Guardian. Their articles are too long and padded.

I guess I can't fully blame them. Google prioritizes lengthy texts as a signal of being authoritative and comprehensive. Most texts these days are twice as long as they need to be.

“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” — Blaise Pascal

Apparently also said by Locke, Franklin, and a bevy of other famous figures too. Good advice, even if the source is unclear.

Source is quite clear, Blaise Pascal, Lettres Provinciales (1657) (repeating after https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/)

I feel like there has to be a way to optimize for economy the same way you can similarly write a program/code snippet that accomplishes a specific output in as few lines and operations as possible but I just can't seem to make it happen for the most part. Always the obsession to endlessly qualify, pontificate, and inabillity to settle on one simple idea with 100% conviction its necessary and sufficient and that I am "okay" for it.

My strategy as a professional writer is to take my near-final version and then simply have a goal of reducing it to at least 75% of the original. There are always superfluous words in a text which has not yet gone through a good reduction.

There's a similar quote: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.", often attributed to Mark Twain.

Indeed. I think that most excellent writers have realized the advantage of writing concisely. I just like Gauss's version the best because he is one of my favourite mathematicians.

And often attributed to Pascal.

This is the problem I have with long form articles. They are promoted as a counter reaction to short shallow articles without substance. Though most of these long form articles are just as shallow. Starting a articles on physics by the description on how a professor wiped his horn rimmed glasses that shimmered in the morning light only to have them steam up again by his first sip of chocolade brown coffee.

> We met in a north London café lined with books, where he calmly unpacked his concerns about the quantum gravity status quo ...

That is fine and quite humane. But sometimes one has to scroll to find the real start of the article.

Nice example. At that point there's a subtle shift in emphasis from quantum gravity as the subject of the article to "my experience talking with a leading quantum gravity researcher" as the subject of an article. What the article is selling is the experience, rather than the knowledge. Which is fine in and of itself, except when that becomes an overly popular pivot and one feels inundated in indirection.

Do you want an experience, or do you want information? The right writing style is very much dependent on the answer to that question.

False dichotomy. Tight writing produces both. For example, there's a quote about Simenon to the effect of "nobody else can in so few words recreate the entire atmosphere of a time and place (france in the ~30s)".

New-Yorker-style long-form articles are a different reading experience compared to an article intended to deliver factoids. These articles are not meant to just deliver news. They are meant to be immersive and also educational. They end up being long-winded because they paint a more comprehensive picture of a particular topic's history, outlook, and also the proponents and detractors involved. The descriptions of the people are intended to give you sense of their mentality and what drives them to champion or fight the article's topic.

Quality can also vary wildly of course. Tight writing also applies to long-form. You do not want to end up meandering.

At their best, they are art. They’re more than a transfer of raw information. They are an extreme compression format.

Sometimes they fall far short of that goal

I think I agree with you

Agree. It is also the mindset.

If I am reading Gauss, my mind wants to process facts immediately.

If I am reading the New Yorker, my mind would like to wander a bit.

It all depends on what you are reading.

A new yorker style article explaining for loops in a programming language. Yeah nobody wants that.

Coming soon to McSweeney's : Gore Vidal's unpublished memoirs of iterative exhaustion during that summer on Fire Island.

Modern books are too long, too. Let's take something like "Atomic Habits", which was god knows how often recommended in various places.. it can be summarised on a few pages max. (Gauss would probably only need 1/3rd of a page..) I think it's psychology and psychology only why those books are too long: 1. more paper seems like it's worth more, so they can charge the $20 or whatever .. 2. reading 4 pages seems trivial, reading 400 is an accomplishment. Having accomplished something (even if its B.S.) increases likelihood that we recommend it, because we want to brag

A few pages? You barely need a single sentence. "Build lasting habits by recognizing how triggers lead to action."

Yeah, one of the problems with being too abstract is that it's open to many interpretations, most of them incorrect. Also, a few pages or paragraphs won't stick; I need examples. I'm not a computer; installing new ideas in my brain isn't like installing apps. My brain prefers storytelling to better grasp ideas and make them its own.

Agreed, but many self-help books either waste their time by making dubious claims from half-sourced research, using useless anecdotes, or repeating the problem in different ways. The best ones actually tell stories of different ways of using its method to solve a variety of problems.

Absolutely, that contextualization can be so useful even if some deem it fluffy. Also no one is obligated to read every single word of a book, if you don't want the anecdotes and case studies, you can skip them! They are helpful for the rest of us.

Ok, but a few sentences explaining what each of those terms mean would be ideal.

This is why there is a paid app that gives you summaries of books everyone is talking about so that you don't have to read them but also won't be left out. For most popular books these days, totally sufficient.

Modern "books". A lot of the problem is that these books, like atomic habits, aren't actually vehicles for information transfer. They're growth hacking blog spam. See also: Deep Work, The Subtle Art of not Giving a Fuck (one of the cringiest things I've read), etc... With this style of book, it's almost always evident by mid-way through chapter 01 that there's no actual book-length warranting content present. They all share that same padded undergrad college paper style of saying nothing about anything by massively over quoting and citing things that don't need quoted or cited.

Deep Work was such an egregious example of betraying its own principles by cluttering up a thesis for the sake of the NYT bestselling list and in doing so wasting its readers’ time.

Yeah almost every nonfiction book is like this which makes me hate reading them (plus half the stuff in psychology/behavioral economics books is unreplicated fabulation).

Small subthread derailment - nonfiction books which are worth the full length. I'll start:

The Making of the Atomic Bomb; Gödel, Escher, Bach; The Ancestor's Tale; Bad Pharma

That’s also true of many management books, where what could have been communicated in 10 to 50 pages has been diluted in 200 pages. I kind of understand why authors and editors were doing that when all books were printed: a 200 pages book looks more “serious”. But in the era of ebooks, it shouldn’t matter anymore.

Not just Google is to blame. In college it wasn't unusual to have minimum length requirements for written work.

I once got into an argument with the teacher for a psychology elective. I asked her to indicate which oft the expected aspects I did not address, but she said she didn't even read it because "it was too short so it couldn't possibly cover everything". I padded it with a bunch of meaningless fluff, resubmitted it and it was accepted.

Really? I've only ever encountered requirements of a _maximum_ length...

I see that you are from Israel, perhaps there is a different practice as compared to my experience in the United States.

All through middleschool, highschool, and college every writing assignment has had a minimum word or page count.

Sometimes we had maximum requirements, but oftentimes just a minimum.

I was nearly a straight-A student on writing assignments in college. I'd often write well below the minimum requirements by filling out my outline, then I'd add fluff around it to reach the minimum words without actually adding any meaningful content, still scored fine.

Truly a profound waste of time.

> I padded it with a bunch of meaningless fluff, resubmitted it and it was accepted.

Similar story here. In college I got extremely good at adding fluff to reach minimum word counts, I performed well on almost all writing assignments doing this. I would write an outline, fill it out with useful information, and then turn a couple sentences of actual content into multiple paragraphs each.

I had an advanced math exam (in physics) and I was at my second page for exercise 1 when the prof wandered around the class. He stopped at me, read a bit, sighted and then said loudly "ladies and gentlemen, I just would like to point out that if your handwriting is not too big, the solution to exercise 1 could fit on one line, max two. Thank you."

What a way to fuck up my day :)

On the flip side, a friend’s thesis was under the university’s mandated minimum word count. She struggled with it for a while but decided to not pad it with fluff and instead deliver what she thought was good, ignoring that requirement. The panel at the defence praised her thesis for being short and concise, in direct contrast to her colleagues’ meandering.

I don’t think they realised that by lowering (or removing) a single integer on the guidelines, they would improve the lives of students, the faculty, and everyone who will ever read those papers.

>Their articles are too long and padded.

because the algorithm rewards this. Which algorithm you ask?

all of them.

Including this comment

Articles are also commonly paid for by the word, and so for anyone paid to write articles it rarely pays to spend more time per word unless doing so gets them a reputation boost sufficient to significantly boost their rate per word.

> To show, not tell.

This is the biggest difference between poor writing and a masterpiece.

For example I just watched episode 2 of the new Star Wars series Ahsoka — where two characters literally tell each other the backstory… for ten minutes.

It’s like listening to two school students reading out the plot summary of a novel.

"Show, don't tell" is where artists can get really clever.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=3FOzD4Sfgag

Yeah, Ashoka is terribly written.

Weird how the same organization wrote the brilliant Andor!

They let a talented writer with a well-defined voice, Tony Gilroy, be the showrunner for Andor. It's so weird that they did that, but that's why it's good. It was not part of the Disney swamp, or at least it was on the fringes of it rather than neck deep. I assume Ahsoka is, though.

tbf television is a very limiting medium. If you tried "show dont tell" for that much exposition you'd be several episodes in. Ahsoka just requires too much backstory for non-Star Wars addicts. Its a show designed for casual fans, so it has to catch us up fast.

Ahsoka is part of the larger canon of things like the clone war cartoons and a handful of random episodes in newer Disney shows. Most fans have no idea about her, the post-ROTJ world its set in, Thrawn, etc. Its a lot to ask to slow burn that.

Also you can slow burn that if you truly wanted, but it comes at a cost. The writers weren't willing to make that sacrifice of other story elements, characters, sub-plots, etc to do this.

I also would argue that 'origin story fatigue' is real. I get impatient with long origin reveals. Just get me into the story and flashback and explain whats going on. I'd rather sit through an exposition episode than a long origins narrative.

Lengthy one-time exposition is perfectly acceptable in tv and film and we do it all the time. I just watched the first episode of Interview with the Vampire and there's a lengthy scene about a previous interview decades before that sets the stage. This isn't the most exciting viewing but allows us to catch up super fast on the story. Its a one-time price to pay that not only sets up the core conflicts but also introduces us to the basics of the main character, the tenor of the show, and the vampire mythologies of this universe.

Novels and such have hundreds of pages to slow burn exposition. In normal script formats you have about 20-25 pages per episode for a 30 min show. Compare that to your average novel at 250-400 pages. Note those 20-25 pages are in screenwriting format, which are closer to 10 or less dense novel pages.

> television is a very limiting medium

an picture is worth 1000 words

Not in a narrative-like way. You can't get Ahsoka's long backstory by just having her pose looking sad holding a lightsaber.

I think this is called “Maid and butler dialogue” according to Brandon Sanderson.

It's even more noticeable if you're watching an ad-free re-run of something that was made to have adverts stuffed inside it. The scene immediately 'refreshes' and you get a character saying, almost literally, "as I told you just a moment ago..." I live in the UK and realising this has ruined a lot of TV for me — The Simpsons, for example, is particularly bad at it.

I’ve been experimenting recently with listening to my writing via a text-to-speech program as a part of the editing process. It’s great for noticing odd sentence patterns and overused words that are less obvious when reading.

This is different from merely reading it out loud by yourself, which doesn’t give you enough distance.

I’ve been doing this for many years. It’s a good strategy for catching typos like “the the” which your eye can just skip over.

I'm going to try this. Any preferences for a low-fuss reader?

I just use the one built into Mac OSX actually. But Hearling.com is also a quick way to download audio files.

On Windows, I use Balabolka to do this.

There's also a Python package on pypi called pyttsx3, which I used to write a very simple command line program to say whatever is on my clipboard.

http://www.cross-plus-a.com/balabolka.htm

https://pypi.org/project/pyttsx3/

Asking ChatGPT/claude2 about a sentence/paragraph, with context like purpose of document (including non-fiction topic or fictional genre) has worked out really well for me.

What I'd really like to do is have a standard "spell/grammar/plothole/tone/etc." critique prompt and have google docs start me from the top and roll down the entire document so we work on one sentence/paragraph at a time and see if I agree with anything pointed out or suggested. Right now there's a lot of copying/pasting, contextless critiquing, but at least claude will be able to read my full document for full context.

This whole process is ripe for "photoshop for writing" software that could help you assembly-line the process somewhat. Storyboarding – describing characteristics of the characters, planning the character evolution, who they meet when, how they change as a person etc, key plot elements – knowing all the well-known and famous plot "compositions" from greatest literature – and using them as templates to create your plot for your characters., checking for factual correctness within your universe, logical consistency etc. fixing your vocabulary – keeping your dictionary of words as small or as big as you want, writing style at a sentence/paragraph/chapter level – being descriptive, being easy to read from a paperback, being easy to listen as an audiobook etc. Software could help you do each of these steps – with AI – and just as a workflow that's split among many different specialized humans – and as process steps that's done in some sequential and iterative manner. I sure hope such a software already exists, if not, I wonder why nobody has already done it.

Scrivener is used for some of this. It mostly gives you tools to invent your own workflow, though. So you can use color coding for some part of plotting etc.

> A great way to see your own work afresh (to read it like a reader) is to deliberately reread your own stuff in slow motion; intensely aware of the order in which the words arrive, and of what they are making happen in your head.

And a great way to facilitate this (which I'm surprised the author didn't mention!) is to change the font in your word processor, or to paste your draft into a different text editing program, or anything else that physically transforms how your draft looks.

When you're doing line edits, adding friction between your words and your eyeballs helps you review each sentence more deliberately; otherwise, it's too easy to glide past the same sentences you've already read a dozen times without considering how they actually sound.

> physically transforms how your draft looks

Most of the time I write in markdown. I'll have a preview tab open in my editor, or generate a preview.

Why is this obsession with “writing”? Every second technical blog post reads like a bad attempt at fiction. To get to the gist of the content which can be fitted in a couple of paragraphs, now we have to meander through pointless metaphors, semi-relevant anecdata and manipulative rhetorical methods.

This post seems to be about writing stories, where the primary goal might be to evoke emotion rather than efficiently convey information. Obsessing over the craft of writing seems appropriate in that context.

Can you expand a bit on your thesis? Any specific examples you can give that demonstrate this meandering you speak of? Do you prefer reading references with dry descriptions? If so, how do you fit those into the context of the subject or problem you are trying to solve? If possible, provide some examples of your own output, or output of the style you prefer, so we can compare.

I've started writing fiction (again for the first time in many years) as a side project cos I had an idea which I think is kind of cool. Reading this has filled me with joy and I will absolutely be using all of the techniques here, especially the big "SHITE" in red pen.

ETA: the funny thing is I'm a software engineer by trade, have been for 18 years, and I gotta say, there is nothing more satisfying than deleting code. Give me a PR filled with seas of red. I love it. Makes a tonne of sense writing would be the same.

Writing is very similar to programming indeed:

"There is however a way to cheat our way into getting it right the first time: instead of designing a (piece of) program once, we can design it two or three times over, compare, and keep the best approach. Nobody has to know about our embarrassing failures. This takes time and effort, but I believe all significant projects deserve it. That said, I understand why in practice most of the code I see is just a rushed first draft: stopping as soon as it “works” is just too damn tempting." [1]

[1]: https://loup-vaillant.fr/articles/source-of-readability

On of the best editing tools in an editors toolbox is the reverse outline.

When you read a text try to make a way too detailed outline for it. In a good text this will still make sense, if you text has jumpy thoughts they will show up in that reverse outline and you can fix them by removing or reshuffling things or by reducing the interuption of the inserted text (by shortening the passage, by rephrasing the sentence, by moving it into a footnote, etc.)

The Stinging Fly is also a fantastic magazine of new short ficton and poetry that I highly reccomend. It's one of the few I've maintained a long-running subscription to. The quality of what they print, and their willingness to print challenging and unusual things, makes them well worth checking out.

Does anyone like the third version of the "flip it" episode?

Yes, has more details in it, but does it really matter she spit the gum in the gutter?

I feel the first version, was just the right amount of information, just put in the wrong order.

Whenever I have the chance, I put what I write through GPT or Claude with an appropriate prompt, something like "rewrite this to be to the point and engaging"

Then I edit the two together.

I find that ChatGPT 3.5 and Claude are worse writers than I am, so they’re on good for content suggestions and organization. On a sentence by sentence basis they tend to make things worse.

2017.

Thanks, edited title.

Chat gpt write me an update on that essay:title.. Experience this tragic irony for me..

Nice font.

Agree! Looks like ET Book, a digitization of Bembo. https://edwardtufte.github.io/et-book/

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