Comment by pimlottc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pimlottc | Hacker News Reader

For pete sake, don't break up the flow and over-complicate your very first sentence with irrelevant asides like this:

> A friend and I were talking about our families today when I realized that my grandmother (this grandmother) became a grandma (not my grandma) at 45.

I got confused and distracted trying to solve the riddle of why his "grandmother" was not his "grandma" [0] when it had nothing to do with the point he was trying to make. And the "this grandmother" parenthetical could have just been a subtle inline link.

> A friend and I were talking about our families today when I realized that _my_grandmother_ became a grandma at 45.

Much clearer!

0: I think he meant that his grandmother's first grandchild, who born when she was 45, was someone other than the author, so technically she wasn't /his/ grandma at that moment because he didn't actually exist yet.

I no longer read anything in parentheses for this exact reason. It seems people tend to write their "live-edits" and "related thoughts" in parentheses rather than spending a moment to figure out what they want to say and writing it clearly. I've found skipping anything within parentheses tends to improve my understanding while reading.

Really? You don't read anything in parentheses? I think that would be harder to do (I'm joking, don't take it seriously) than actually reading the parenthetical information.

> I think that would be harder to do than actually reading the parenthetical information.

You must be joking, right?

This is my take on writing as well, I consider everything in parentheses as optional. If I want to write something in parentheses, I try to reconsider: either drop it, or write it without parentheses.

For a substack called "memoirs & rambles", I think writing in a style that conveys a bit of the writer's own personality is fine, even if it comes at the expense of clarity. Not everything has to be an Argument Paper.

i would have said it like this:

my grandmother became a grandma to my cousin at 45

Append to that "x years before I was born"

I would have been more distracted wondering where the link went.

I kind of enjoyed the riddle.

I'd just move the parenthetical to a separate sentence, or leave it out.

How is this unclear from what he wrote?

Not everything has to be clear and to the point. The sentence's murkiness adds emotion to the text. I'm not a native speaker (just like the writer isn't) and maybe that's why we're not so bothered.

But this comment is exactly what I expected from HN.

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