I give you feedback on your blog post draft but you don't send it to me (2021) | Hacker News Reader

I give you feedback on your blog post draft but you don't send it to me (2021)

mango.pdf.zone

226 pointsTomte95 comments

Fundamentals I picked up from years of writing on the Internet:

- Shorter sentences

In general, you should aim to write sentences with 8-13 words each.

- Shorter words

You may think of this as "dumbing-down" your writing, but you don't get bonus points for saying utilizing instead of using.

- One idea per sentence

In other words, don't write non sequiturs.

- One concept per paragraph

Quoting Umberto Eco: "You are not Proust. Do not write long sentences."[1]

[1]https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/umberto-eco-how-to-write-...

It is dumbing down. Let's not dance around that particular bush. Shorter sentences and words with fewer syllables is why mainstream media has a following. Simplistic messaging for the simpleton masses.

So yes, your advice is great if you want to sell a blog. It's terrible if you actually want to write.

The point of a blog is, more often than not, to communicate something. It’s not a writing exercise. If writing using a simple style helps you communicate to more people more easily then that’s a win.

Also, “simplistic messaging for the simpleton masses” is a terrible way to look at the current situation if you ask me.

I don't like it anymore than you do,

Which is why my blog is a "writing exercise," as you put it. I believe people can be more engaged with their media, but it is admittedly easier to go for the slogan-style messaging nobody has to think too hard about. I dream of a world where everyone has valuable, well-considered input and I will continue to write as though I live in that world until we get there.

Asking someone who wants to practice the art of writing to do otherwise is no different than asking a painter to just make stick figures.

GP comment says that more often than not the blogger isn't an artist. I'd like to add that not only blog-sellers can benefit from the advice above: if someone is drawing an instruction manual, making an expressionist painting is counterproductive to the totally valid goal of conveying information as clearly as possible and in the most digestible manner. Stick to the stick figures if that's your goal.

And if you write primarily for the sake of writing, I don't think anyone is telling _you_ to change your approach in a way that doesn't fit _your_ goals. The advice are for others.

You're missing the point I'm trying to make and that's probably on me because I didn't explain it very clearly.

You wrote

> So yes, your advice is great if you want to sell a blog. It's terrible if you actually want to write.

The advice has nothing to do with selling a blog—whatever that means—and more to do with communication. Writing, especially on the web, is more often than not a communication tool and not an exercise in rhetoric.

And the point of communication is to, well, communicate. Using complex language doesn't take you closer to that goal. If you write 4000 words when 200 can be used to convey the same message and the result is that fewer people end up reading what you wrote then your communication is not effective.

Now, if what you want is to write as an artistic expression then by all means write 4000 words or even 40000. That's totally fine and nobody is stopping you from doing that obviously.

> Using complex language doesn't take you closer to that goal.

Complex language should not be used for its own sake, but it is often the most succinct and clearest way to express your points.

Communicating half of an idea to 1000 people can be worth less than exactly communicating an idea to 2 people.

its not dumbing down. most people have no clue how to write long AND clear sentences. so in practice this mitigates bad writing for most of us.

Bear in mind that not everyone is a native speaker. Using simpler words ensures the widest audience.

I agree that not every piece of writing has the same intended audience, but I take umbrage at the use of the term "singleton masses".

I admit my phrasing was harsh, but I stand by it with a caveat that I could have expressed it better. I personally do not think of the masses as "simpletons," but I believe our media and product manufacturers most certainly do. There should have been a semi-colon between those two sentences, or something.

My own writing could use more work, but I suppose that is the point of practicing it as an art.

I find the appeal to non-native speakers to be patronizing in itself. English is my fourth language and I understand long words and complex sentence structure just fine.

Not everyone's good at languages. I really appreciate it when people write simply, so I only have to look a few thousand words up in the dictionary to understand it.

You can have a very high level discussion with remarkably simple language. Plato was very good at this, but it's something you see in a lot of good communicators.

I remember I was struck reading a graduate level physics textbook co-authored by Feynman when I was a student. I was amazed how much clearer the language was than almost anything else I'd read at that level. It wasn't that it only used simple words, but it only used enough of them to be precise where precision was needed, and it took the time to introduce concepts even though they were expected to be known to the reader already, just as a refresher as to exactly what the discussion was about.

The clarity comes from the fact while we typically share opinions about what common and simple terms mean, we may have slightly different ideas associated with more complex words, especially with regards to intangible subjects. Plato's treatment of the concept of Justice is a good example of this. We all think we know what the word means, but to actually pin the meaning down is quite a task.

But honestly, Plato was dumbing it down, Feynman was dumbing it down, you should dumb it down too. A fundamental truth of communication is that you know the idea in your head better than your audience. You can't treat them as peers that understand what you are trying to say until you've clearly said it.

The problem in any communication is to get your idea across as vividly as possible.

I like your examples, but I disagree. Having also read Plato and many of the speculative writings that address his work, much of it is still up for debate, especially when context is not understood. Feynman, whom I enjoy as well, often said some really nonsensical things that he probably thought had a lot of philosophical depth (I think specifically of The Pleasure of Finding Things Out which is a nice feel-good piece but does not bring much meat to the table afterall). To be fair to him and your example, he did absolutely have a knack for breaking down scientific complexities to terms non-scientists could grasp, which I applaud. Yes, let's do more of that.

So, sure, there is a time where simpler language is an exercise in how well you know a thing. Being able to break it down into simpler terms makes sense. But we do have to be careful with the language. It's dynamic, as you mention, often subject to interpretation that could lead to misunderstanding or improper handling of an idea. I did it in my initial reply.

That said, one must know one's audience and subject, I think. Am I conveying a concept from physics to non-technical individuals who might not care what I have to say in the first place? Sure, simplify. Am I telling a story about a personal experience or some relatable problem in my field? Expect a detailed and nuanced picture to be painted.

Thanks for the comment, it gave me something to think about.

No form of writing benefits from purposefully making it longer and harder to read. You might be writing about complex topics, but you still want to strive towards simplicity. As simple as possible, but no simpler.

There’s a difference between making something needlessly complicated and just using meaningful words for the task at hand. The difference between someone who writes eloquently and someone who just writes well, one might say.

Maybe no form of _non-fiction_ writing benefits from it, but that's not the only type of writing there is. Let me link a clip from Dead Poets Society regarding this: https://youtu.be/WfZu-Um9PV0?feature=shared

People post fiction on the internet?

Yeah, well the time? Plenty of sites dedicated to that. You get feedback on your writing quickly, although if it's serialized there's some drawbacks for pacing.

Web fiction as a draft has essentially become the norm for light novel type books (<300 pages ultimately published as epub)

Random example: https://www.ironteethserial.com/dark-fantasy-story/story-int...

There's more fiction on the Internet than there is in print.

The poetry I like is by nature beautiful. Beauty is not created by taking a thesaurus and shaking it upside-down over your keyboard.

Are you morose? Perhaps you are sad, very sad in fact, but find that you are neither glum nor morose, not disheartened nor heartbroken, not anguished nor stricken, not unsure of how you will go on nor distressed, and neither grieved nor aggrieved nor yet maddened with grief. Perhaps your feelings of sadness are to be expressed quietly and without intruding.

I'm sure there's a sensible middleground between never using big words vs. using them only to add complexity.

That's absolutely true. I would like them used in an intentional way, though.

If you just slap them down anywhere then you end up with a sentence like "Obscurantist verbiage is a calling card of the intellectual qua gatekeeper, in that necessary role serving to further the creeping and not unimpenetrable calcification of human linguistic torture" and anyone who has to read your writing will wish you were dead, which is bad, or copy you, which is worse.

Big words are like specialist power tools - they have their place, and if you know how to use them, add a massive amount of value.

But if you don't, or if you can reasonably use simpler words, don't use the big ones.

I think a better wording would be to think of writing the same way as programming. It needs a certain level of complexity to be correct, but it should never have any more than strictly necessary.

>It is dumbing down.

A dumb man says little with few words.

A smart man says a lot with many words.

A wise man says the least.

"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use." - Hemingway

“I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English―it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them―then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.” -- Mark Twain

Writing simpler and shorter sentences doesn't always mean you are dumbing down. Before my tech/IT career, I had plans to be a lawyer and majored in Philosophy.

People might find it surprising that students were explicitly told to write as simply as possible. I come to prefer this way of writing and its a clear benefit in written communication.

It looks like there are some assumptions on why someone would write a blog. If my goal was to get the most visibility with my blog, I would choose a simpler writing style because I think its the most efficient.

More long form or flowery prose can still be posted, if that is what your audience is looking for.

Hemingway wept.

> you don't get bonus points for saying utilizing instead of using

Except on HN, because we're above it all.

Even then I find myself often mentally substituting the bafflegab technobabble with the well-worn but still useful English words that would have clearly expressed exactly the same ideas to someone half a century ago. And likely still half a century hence.

Communities has expectations:

  ~$ su - roman

You're not explicitly saying to dumb it down, but I'd be curious if this advice would scale to genuinely deep content.

The cynical hypothesis is that people don't want to think about what you wrote, and if you put enough pretty pictures and big fonts that even people who didn't pay much attention will have a good time.

I'd be curious if perhaps a seminal blog post (e.g. one of PG's) could be rewritten in this style without sounding reductive and oversimplified.

>I'd be curious if this advice would scale to genuinely deep content.

For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_sale:_baby_shoes,_never_wo...

Most blog posts are not deep content though. Even from people that might be considered experts on the topic they are writing about. Deep content is still more the arena of whitepapers/e-books/conference presentations.

When someone can write about deep content in a simple way, they really understand it.

> - One idea per sentence

> In other words, don't write non sequiturs.

That doesn't follow. A non sequitur isn't "two or more ideas per sentence".

Yeah, that was quite a non-sequitur :)

I assumed that was a bonus tip.

See also Samuelson https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/goodwriting.... whose first two points are "have a point" and "get to the point".

> You may think of this as "dumbing-down" your writing, but you don't get bonus points for saying utilizing instead of using.

Can you please summarize this? We ain't got all day to read this 21-word-long textwall.

Using sophisticated words doesn't make your thoughts sophisticated. Sophisticated thoughts make your words sophisticated.

You learn a wide vocabulary so you know how many words of the right kind to say.

Or in other words: A dumb man knows nothing, a smart man knows everything, a wise man knows he knows nothing.

Sophisticated structures made of simple words can work wonders. Be sure not to overdo it.

Short word good. Big word only good if short word can't word like big word.

Also:

- Don't litter your piece with links. Readers often don't know where they lead, whether the linked information is important for understanding the article, and which links may be skipped safely. So each link will slow the reader down, and make it more likely that they stop reading the whole thing. Similar to an overly long piece.

Better:

- skip links that are not strictly necessary

- replace links with short explanations of the core idea of the linked article, if possible (i.e. don't link to Wikipedia if you can quickly explain the concept in a sentence)

- only include links in a way that makes it is clear what is explained in the link target, so readers know whether they even have to click on it or not

Use foot notes or margin note. I don’t mind links, but I open them in the backgroumd for further exploration, not while I’m reading the article. But foot notes work great for contextualization.

I find footnotes slow me down as well because I'm compelled to read every single one of them. Though they are better than links.

The links help convey credibility and trust to the reader ; it's not expected that the reader will actually click them

I think many will click them nonetheless, especially when it is hard to judge how relevant the linked article is.

My philosophy towards writing is remembering how I wrote the multitude of bullshit papers I was assigned in college classes and then doing the exact opposite.

The vast majority of things that I was told to write about were objectively uninteresting and SHOULD have been summarized in a paragraph or two. So I padded those babies out with long words, meandering and passive phrasing, tangents, definitions, and so forth. I don't think any teacher or professor ever directly called me out for obviously sacrificing quality for correctness. But in hindsight, I rather wish they had.

(There's probably a deeper story in here about how some parts of college actively prevent students from succeeding in real life.)

There are many people, myself included, who have tried every piece of writing advice under the sun, and it's still hit or miss, mostly miss. Writing is especially hard because it's impossible to predict what will turn the reader off even if meticulous care is taken. It's similar to opsec in that even when every precaution is taken there may still be holes you failed to anticipate but is obvious to the attacker.

Such problems only enough test readers will point out in their feedback. If you don't have them, though luck.

But at what point does it become no longer "blog" and just generic "content"?

Personally, I'd strongly insist that the whole point of blogs was to do whatever the fuck you want.

Because that was the point when they emerged: they democratized publishing the way the internet democratized the share and spread of information on a worldwide scale.

For better *AND* (you better believe) worse.

Now, if you're concerned about reach, engagement, monetization, etc., well that's a related but absolutely distinct discussion.

This doesn't have to be about making your writing more generic. Both Mark Twain and George Orwell wrote about the need to be concise when writing, and you'd be hard-pressed to describe either of them as generic.

For me, I write a blog because I want to communicate what I'm thinking to other people. If I didn't, I'd just write a journal and keep it next to my bed. Therefore the effectiveness (and affectiveness) of that communication is important to me. In my experience, doing that well means being concise, having a clear structure, and a lot of the other pieces of advice in this post.

The primary goal of any aspiring writer on any medium should first and foremost be to write.

Recommending certain guidelines or approaches is certainly fine. Self-reflection and self-improvement is usually an admirable goal but not at the cost of just doing the damn thing.

And, frankly, invoking seasoned professional authors is just silly when the topic is amateur blogging.

And let's not pretend unwarranted criticism—or even just unnecessary expectations—so often just ends up being unhelpful and literally counterproductive or, much worse, a form of gatekeeping.

> invoking seasoned professional authors is just silly when the topic is amateur blogging

It's all communication. Obviously there is nothing wrong with someone blogging haphazardly, just as there is nothing wrong with writing a web app in Brainfuck.

The best way to practice writing is to write, but that doesn't mean that the writing is the goal. I write to communicate, and if you haven't understood what I've written, then I've not met my goal. That's true even if it was still very good practice to write out those words.

I agree with you that unwarranted criticism is unhelpful, and I agree that in blogging, we shouldn't hold others to higher standards than they wish to be held. If you've found a form of writing that brings you joy, then carry on and enjoy it.

But at least for myself, I want to keep on improving in my writing. That's why I (aspirationally) try and learn from great writers like Orwell and Twain, and why I find advice like this useful. I know I'm never going to do this professionally, and I'm quite happy to enjoy writing as a thing for me and me alone, but part of that enjoyment will always be pushing myself to write better.

It sounds like you're making the kind of choices that will undoubtedly hone your writing, and for that I sincerely commend you. (This is certainly an area I could improve in myself.)

A concern I have would be that someone is too eagerly trying to employ a formula that they perceive—or have been told—exists and never develop their own style. Never experimenting or trying new things. Then conclude that they aren't not a good writer and have failed, when they simply never found their own voice, which then sparked something in them and others.

Some of the most notable bloggers I can think of that I have repeatedly come back and read time and again—even ones whose writing style I don't particularly care for but whose views I find compelling and a unique contribution to a given topic of conversation—each of them notably has a very particular, distinctive, and typically consistent voice that they blog in.

I'd say that the first and foremost goal of a writer is to communicate. Writing is the medium chosen to do that.

I can't tell if there is any emotion (sadness) associated with those rules, but I've found, sadly, that those and more apply to business email. It didn't use to be that way, but now that folks don't even know what bottom posting is, much less are able to discuss the merits:

- one idea per email

- exec summary must be first ... don't lay out a case then summarize at the end

- only 1 question per email

if it's more complex than that, you need to break it up into a kind of detective clue-hunting trap sequence, where you ask each question in turn, in a multiple exchange thread. never try to shortcut it / condense into a single message.

- it is acceptable for your signature to be multiples of the body size

This is mostly advice for audience maximation, not for writing well.

I'm very much a fan of the inverted pyramid structure[1], which is alluded to in the post but not quite spelled out.

You want the point of the article as early as possible, in the title or the first paragraph, and then you elaborate on why. This filters out people who aren't going to be interested, and piques the interest of those who will.

You can also just stop reading at any point and will have gotten the most out of it anyway.

Most annoying format of writing I know is the article that strings you along some meandering 40k word essay and you can barely find out what it's about until two thirds the way down.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)

One annoying feature of the inverted pyramid structure is that it often isn’t clear to the reader. The reader reads on and things keep getting rehashed in more and more (not necessarily interesting) detail, and to the reader it’s not clear that the article is effectively already done in its scope and no new point will be coming up (although they’re not even halfway through the article), until they give up because it just keeps endlessly meandering on.

This is how I feel about a lot of books, such as The Lean Startup. Technically, there's a new topic with every chapter, but after the first 100 pages or so I feel like I get the gist, and I'm not really learning much new.

A lot of modern book publishing has turned into a bit of a bait and switch grift. You take 2 post-it notes worth of ideas and pad them out to 300 pages with tangentially related anecdotes, because on average people buy books online based on the title and the page count alone, and put them on a shelf for several years before they read them, meaning they can't return them by the time they find out.

Which is why my first read is just skimming the book, marking important passages. Then I read just these passages, write notes down, and put the book away. But I often buy heavily discounted books.

Separating level of detail

Publications can avoid frustration from repetition related to the inverted pyramid structure by clearly splitting up the multiple levels of details they provide As you say the inverted pyramid structure can lead to repetition. If this isn't made clear to the reader it can be confusing and frustrating for the reader. One common solution to this is to use a convention that clearly separates the levels of detail. In newspapers a common way of doing this is to first have a headline with the key point, then for the second level, a short summary in a different font, say italics, and finally the full article at the third level. In scientific articles, there is the title and abstract with similar functions. Books can have many levels, with a title, subtitle, summary on the back, foreword, preface and introductory chapter.

Couldn't you do something like "I did X by YYYing after working around P by doing Z and Q by doing A. Here are some details about how I worked around P and Q and my strategy for YYY."?

My technical writing course stressed that structure should be obvious. Better awkwardly obvious than so subtle people miss it.

You can do it in a way that works, but the typical journalistic way is not that.

I despise the inverted pyramid structure, at least as it was practiced in most newspapers. Starting with the BLUF is good practice, but after that the article becomes a disjointed smattering of factual tidbits, quotes from random people, rehashing of previous information with no flow or continuity and the reader is left to piece together the story on their own.

I much prefer writers who organize the information in an article according to what makes it easiest to understand and flows best. You still start with a brief summary, but then it diverges from inverted pyramid. Sometimes this means putting things in chronological order, which means mixing more important and less important information as you go. Other times it means giving background information early on which helps to understand later information, which inverse pyramid would would put at the very end.

It means the article can't easily be edited by chopping off the end, and it puts the onus on the writer to decide what information to include and what to cut, what background to summarize and what to link, and how to organize the content. But the result is much more readable.

If you write a recipe, don't forget to start the post by a long story that recounts your whole life and your grand parents'. A recipe without this doesn't taste good, and everybody is interested in your story. A few pages of this annoys nobody I know.

One time I was baking a cake from an online recipe, probably just after recipe sites discovered the importance of verbosity for SEO. I found myself struggling a bit because the recipe wasn't very clearly structured and was quite vague about several of the steps, but I managed to work something out and get it in the oven.

It was only then that I discovered what I had been reading was an anecdote about one time the author had baked this cake, and the actual method was given below!

Oh how badly SEO and copyright have screwed over online recipes... Sadly, the former have basically screwed over all kinds of online wrting, since everyone's trying to please Google rather than their readers.

Funnily enough, the article had too many headings for me. I’m scared of Wall of Texts as much as the next netizen, but I need… text fences? Something a bit more than Heading-Paragraph repeated.

I agree, but that's their way of breaking quite a long article into chunks that others would find digestible.

It also helps that they include 8 pictures. They break things up, even if they are otherwise unnecessary.

Their second heading is the same size as the first one, which made me think it's already the next blog post. IMHO, they're too big regardless. They're fine as a title but a (sub)heading doesn't need a 40px font.

I noticed that I automatically switched to only reading headings when the sections were super short. I guess there is some kind of rule here: The more headings you use, the less people will read your paragraphs.

What I don't see represented in this conversation is the idea that you can just write for personal satisfaction, or examine something you're personally interested in. Not everyone needs to have 10k+ monthly active readers. Not everything needs to be a rat race. Why don't we see blogging like exercise? Sure you'll have your body builders, but some people just go on walks, and no one is doing anything "wrong" they just have different goals.

Indeed. Not everything needs to be an optimization game.

What also isn't discussed much that that readers have different tastes. Sometimes I enjoy a long, rambling narrative if I like the author's style (eg Sadly, Porn). Other times I wish they'd have just written a pamphlet with their 1 interesting idea (eg Die With Zero).

Yeah, they could have put it differently in the

> Of course, you can go off talking about something you find interesting, so long as you explain it in a way the audience can understand. You can use the Mario 0.5x A presses video as your guiding light, your North Star, if you will. ↩

bit.

(After all, the Internet *excells* in allowing people with niche interests to find each other !)

And focused more on how it's about not losing the readers that would actually find it interesting if it was presented just a little bit better.

This reminds me uncannily of the anecdote from news media:

1. Say what you're about to say

2. Say it

3. Say what you just said

I read it a while back so unfortunately I don't have a source.

I've heard this is a standard advice given to high school students in North America writing essays.

Fantastic advice, packaged in a fun and relatable way. Accurate.

This blog post started good~ish, but around 1/3 of it, I got bored, the style got repetitive, the style wasn't enough to keep me there, and the content was sparse, very sparse.

An advice: dense content is cool. If it could fit on my screen, that would be the best. Put a ToC (where C should stand for the content) at the top of the blog post maybe. Or a cheat sheet poster pdf, or cuttable flashcards, with Amazon Affiliate links to new monitors. (Sorry, no original jokes today.)

> "It’s best practice to consider different perspectives. A review by an independent third party can lead to increased success."

> What are you trying to tell me? It’s so vague it could mean anything. Who talks like that?

Not who, what: AI.

Who, what, where, when, why?

Organize with inverted pyramid (most important information at the top).

Avoid jargon and fancy words. Use examples.

This is all basic stuff you'd learn in a journalism class. Does anyone teach that anymore?

I bet they do, but the great thing with blogs is that you don't need to get a journalism degree first to publish one !

Speaking of jargon, what does "on main" mean ?

EDIT : This is the issue with «write like you talk / being too 'cute'» : with too much slang you're losing part of your target audience, especially as the blogpost gets older !

Other problematic examples in there that I got, but barely : «top text bottom text» (though thankfully solved by the author following their own advice about multimedia examples), and «galaxy brained».

(Great advice otherwise.)

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/horny-on-main

I read the entire thing. that doesnt happen often.

entertaining and very true. I will be sending this article to people next time I see them waffling on something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com