Rules of good writing (2007) | Hacker News Reader

Rules of good writing (2007)

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113 pointssantiviquez80 comments

>Readers comprehend “the boy hit the ball” quicker than “the ball was hit by the boy.” Both sentences mean the same, but it’s easier to imagine the object (the boy) before the action (the hitting). All brains work that way.

I agree with this, but I doubt that all brains work this way. It's probably true of almost all English speakers.

I think the processing effort is likely a side effect of English mainly using sentence constructions that go subject->verb->object. Not all languages do that, so I suspect that your brain has an easier time processing whatever's most common in the language.

Over 80% of the world's languages are classified as SVO or SOV, actually, and probably over 90% of all first language speakers today speak one of these two. Their overwhelming dominance compared to the other four possibilities have led researchers to conclude there may actually be a cognitive benefit to putting the subject first.

arabic can be VSO or SVO. i'm rather new to the langauge but tend to prefer VSO when writing, even as a native english speaker, which gets me to wonder if theres a correlation somewhere between arabic proficiency, other known languages, and VSO/SVO preference. my preference might come from the relative conciseness of VSO in arabic though; often placing the subject before the verb is a bit redundant given context. i'm sure theres a correlation to programming language typing schema somewhere there :)

VSO is kinda like AT&T-syntax x86 assembly, if you identify subject with source and object with destination:

    add %rdi, %rax

It's good to combined both to form a sort of palindrome to chain ideas together. This is explained in more detail in Style: Toward Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams.

Or, in "Intel Latin" (machine code),

  01001000 00000001 11111000

adding to this, besides VSO and SVO. Arabic can also write in OSV and OVS, not very popular in day-to-day use, but is often found in more traditional contexts. What is more interesting is: Diacritical marks (aka vowels) in Arabic can completely alter what is subject and object!

They are a bit similar to strong types in programming, you can have one sentence, and by changing its marks/diacritics (specifically called short vowels), you change what gets to be subject or object.

This is why Arabic poetry (especially Pre-Isalmic) is very interesting in its expressivenss and structural complexity even in the shortest poems (reminds me of code-golfing).

Interesting see I. Don't Yoda harshly judge. ;o)

There probably is. For me receiving the subject after anything else requires me to buffer everything else awaiting the subject in order to parse it correctly. My brain seems to naturally work in cause->effect order so it's naturally easiest for me to process the cause first and then the effect. I don't think everyone works the same way, but there is definitely an order of information flow that is most efficient for me. I also generally seem to process things somewhat like an LLM would...

"My brain seems to naturally work in cause->effect order"

You must be Jesus. Most brains observe events first and use that information to reason about their causes.

Ha. That for me actually seems to be impaired, which is why I had to do special education. These days I usually have enough of a knowledge base to build hypotheses for most situations, but it was far more difficult for me to reason about the cause of things that I had nothing else to relate to. Stuff like this is probably why autism tends to be treated like some sort of super learning impediment.

Anyway, I think about causes first when I am either performing actions or processing other performances of actions. It's one of the reasons why I can appear to be good at empathy to certain people, because I can usually nail down the exact reason for something far better than others can guess why it maybe could have happened. It's weird how that works sometimes.

I weirdly learned this by chance. Most, if not all, Indian languages (as far as I know) are spoken/written in the passive voice. It sounds more respectful that way. Hence, the default way for us Indians is to speak English in the passive voice.

Early on, I forced myself to write and speak in the active voice. Now, I believe, it comes naturally to write or speak English the “right” way.

> Both sentences mean the same

Not really. The first sentence is about a boy, the second is about a ball. The best one to use depends on context.

> I think the processing effort is likely a side effect of English mainly using sentence constructions that go subject->verb->object. Not all languages do that, so I suspect that your brain has an easier time processing whatever's most common in the language.

This isn't true at all. Passive voice is extremely common in everyday speech, and sentences constructed with linking verbs are almost certainly more common than either active or passive voice.

And that accounting of the language considers only utterances consistinf od grammatically correct, complete main clauses, which constitute by far the minority of the sentential constructions a native speaker of English will produce in a day.

If everything you said in a normal day were a complete sentence, let alone uniformly or predominantly active voice, you'd sound completely deranged and unhinged.

If whatever's most common in the language really were easiest for readers or listeners to understand, then active-voice constructions should be the most cognitively challenging. They aren't.

I think the counterargument to this simplistic assertion is that "The boy was hit by a ball" seems equally legible to me to "A ball hit the boy". If you're quickly reporting the details of an accident to a doctor and it's crucial to get the information across quickly, I think many speakers would still start with "He was hit by a ball", not "A ball hit him." We're not interested in assigning agency to the ball here, we're interested in the effects on the boy. We're focusing down on the boy first, then talking about what is happening. Is he hitting a ball? Getting hit by a ball? Nobody cares what the ball's doing, it doesn't need to be prepped for surgery.

I think you're onto something with "agency". In particular, "a car hit him" seems much less out-of-place than "a ball hit him", but we're more used to treating cars as first-class objects with agency, as compared to how we perceive balls.

"I think many speakers would still start with "He was hit by a ball", not "A ball hit him." We're not interested in assigning agency to the ball here, we're interested in the effects on the boy."

And you don't favor the shorter message?

I don’t think I would. But not willing to stage a real life experiment where I need to convey this information in an emergency to test my hypothesis.

Imagine how boring literature (or really most sorts of writing) would be if we optimized it around theories of linguistic efficiency rather than taste. I'm left entirely unconvinced.

Anyone optimizing for some specific taste already has an implicit theory of linguistic efficiency. Most writers aren’t optimizing for anything at all, and they have no taste, and their writing is boring, and it wastes my time, and I hate it.

> Anyone optimizing for some specific taste already has an implicit theory of linguistic efficiency

I don't follow. How do you connect taste and efficiency in your perspective? Efficiency in what terms? They seem almost unrelated from my perspective.

> Most writers aren’t optimizing for anything at all, and they have no taste, and their writing is boring, and it wastes my time, and I hate it.

Wasting time is probably my favorite reason to read. Cannot disagree more.

I had the same thought, glad you phrased it so succinctly! Surprisingly, a Holocaust-denying white nationalist is not someone you should trust on matters concerning global anthropology.

>Holocaust-denying

Didn't he write "no reasonable person doubts that the Holocaust happened" in the blog post you are referring to? That's an....unusual way to deny the Holocaust.

A discredited organization labeled Adams a Holocaust-denier, so NPCs consider him such.

woah

I suspect they were talking about Scott Adams; not Michael Lynch (but it's fuzzy, due to ... unclear writing).

I'm not a huge fan of Scott Adams, because I disagree with his worldview, but I have other hills to die on.

He’s not wrong about this, but he’s just repeating very old “tribal knowledge,” about writing. I’ve been hearing the same advice, since I was a kid. Sometimes, I even follow it.

Most writing articles (including this one) are rehashes of Strunk & White. One exception is "Style: Toward Clarity and Grace", which provides a new, higher-level way of understanding writing and how to make it better. I highly recommend that book if you're looking for something more advanced than the standard advice.

Agreed, and rehashing Strunk & White sucks because Strunk & White wasn’t a great guide in the first place. Strunk & White boiled down the advice to aphorisms and you have to kind of understand what good writing is before you read it. The aphorisms don’t make sense if you don’t already understand them.

Meanwhile, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace gives concrete advice, examples, and exercises.

+1 for Style: TCAG

It's one of the few books that approaches the topic in a systematic, structured way. Not a rehash of platitudes like "try and be concise".

I know I need to "omit needless words". What I don't know is which words are "needless". Style answers that with linguistics and cognitive psychology.

Surely. Then you check Paul Graham, whose writing is influential in the world of startup, and find most of them are very long. Arguably unnecessarily so.

Perhaps it's a tech startup thing? After all programmers are not famous for their refined literary taste. And then you check the few LitMag that people care enough to pay for even when the content is available for free, like Clarkesworld or BCS. Then you find sentences there are generally not crispy and short.

It turns out there aren't rules. All guidelines are contextual.

PG is not influential because of his writing though. His name is what gets his writing circulated, so I'm not sure if it's a good couter example.

He became well-known via his writing in the early-mid 00s; first his book about Lisp then his essays that became popular on Slashdot. His investing happened as a consequence of his writing.

His investing happened as a consequence of having available capital (and, certainty, forward-looking ideas about how to seed startups).

As to the writing, I think its influence (in terms of ideas) makes people overrate its stylistic quality. An enjoyable critique: https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

Paul Graham had an audience before he was an investor, which is the point Tom was making. He didn't get famous because of Viaweb; he got famous as an eloquent smug lisp weenie.

pg writes [1]:

YC grew out of a talk I gave to the Harvard Computer Society (the undergrad computer club) about how to start a startup. Everyone else in the audience was probably local, but Steve and Alexis came up on the train from the University of Virginia, where they were seniors. Since they'd come so far I agreed to meet them for coffee.

The talk he gave was How To Start A Startup [2]. The reason he was asked to give that talk was not because he had money, but because he was a Harvard CS alum who had built/sold a successful startup then spent the subsequent few years sharing his knowledge/ideas via books and essays.

The reason Steve knew about pg was that he had read/liked his Lisp book and read/liked his essays on Slashdot.

Money was a necessary but not sufficient condition for him to start YC. Nobody would have applied to YC if not for his books and essays.

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/the-reddits

[2] https://paulgraham.com/start.html

The other way around.

Of course a lot of rich people got readers just because they're rich, but PG isn't the one of them.

Yes, PG is influential primarily because of his writing. He wrote On Lisp, which is still well-regarded today, before founding Viaweb. Viaweb itself did not make him well-known; there were many newly wealthy dot-com millionaires at the time, and he was just one of many, except that he wrote far more persuasive essays. At the time that I wrote https://paulgraham.com/redund.html we were discussing programming language design on a mailing list, and there was not yet any suggestion of a VC fund.

The reason he got into venture capital was that some of those essays urged ambitious young people to start startups, drawing on his own experience, and specifically to write SaaS software in Lisp, as he had. The Y Combinator fund came afterwards, and its dealflow came from the people who had been persuaded by those essays. That's why the first version of Reddit was written in Lisp.

If Y Combinator had not been successful, he would have remained well known for his essays.

Though some of his ideas were not correct, looking back, it is hard to name any other writer of persuasive essays of the past quarter century whose work has been similarly impactful, except perhaps Mencius Moldbug. Moldbug's work may turn out to be less impactful—I certainly hope it does—but it's too early to tell.

Sorry but 'On Lisp' is not well regarded amongst common lispers at least. I don't fraternise with that group for over a decade, but they really disliked his general content.

Have you seen any critiques of the book you can share?

Y Combinator came after his essays; though I don’t agree with everything Paul Graham says, those essays profoundly shaped me.

Here's pg's writing advice, published in 2005:

https://www.paulgraham.com/writing44.html

Graham writes in punchy sentences. But I often find the overall thrust uncompelling. He has a habit of waffling whilst glossing over nuance. I suspect you're right: writing for entrepeneurs is a slightly different skillset.

The first three paragraphs are good advice for business writing. Strunk made the same point with "Omit needless words".

If you approach (or would like to approach) writing more from the perspective of a craft rather than meeting KPIs, Stephen King's On Writing is great.

You mean, "Omit words".

Or maybe I mean "Omit."

Or maybe if I didn't even post a reply, I would have added the same value to this thread.

⠀

"Rules of good writing", really? The article's title ironically commits a lexical gaffe by presenting its topic as a value instead of a choice.

Whether the title draws more readers than "Rules of clear writing" is a separate topic, one dealing less with principles and more with marketing.

Strunk & White, the source for most of the article's ideas, isn't mentioned. We may bury the past, but we can't deny it.

I recently boiled my copy of Strunk & White until little remained. At the bottom of the pot was "Make every word count."

PG's essays are optimized to be persuasive, and probably this choice of title contributes to that. Your alternative title would indeed be more informative.

"The main technique is keeping things simple."

Orwell also knew to avoid clichés, and lo, he made a much stronger argument for simplicity in his essays. "Keep it simple" means nothing by itself and Adams does not explain the concepts he hints at or even call them by their proper names.

None of the above would seem obnoxious had he actually cited Orwell.

> 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.

Yes. (Hemingway).

This is great advice if you want to write like Hemingway. Most of the great authors are not so sparing with their words, though. And I often find that people who excessively prune their writing end up with quite generic paragraphs that seem like they were written for elementary school children. I've personally found a better tip for writing is to not use two "cheap" words when one "expensive" one will convey your meaning more fully. To use your example, "He was very happy" doesn't convey as much feeling as, "He was ecstatic". But depending on what you want to say, "He was restlessly giddy with barely contained joy" could be even better.

Most users of written English are not the Great Authors, though, nor are they writing literature. Hemingway is a much more appropriate model for business communication than is, say, Wallace. Though for attention-grabbing copy, you’d probably want Morrison’s or Nabokov’s dynamism. And if you’re code-golfing, nothing beats a Borges, Chiang, or Cusk.

The Hemingway editor is great for word pruning [0].

[0] https://hemingwayapp.com/

This has been my go-to pruner since a while. The best thing I learnt is to break up long sentences into shorter ones.

I believer there is an error in

"Readers comprehend “the boy hit the ball” quicker than “the ball was hit by the boy.” Both sentences mean the same, but it’s easier to imagine the object (the boy) before the action (the hitting). All brains work that way. (Notice I didn’t say, “That is the way all brains work”?)".

It should be, "the SUBJECT (the boy) before the action (the hitting)." (I added caps for emphasis.)

> "the boy hit the ball"

In this sentence, boy=subject, hit=verb, ball=object.

> All brains work that way.

If language sentence structure reflects how brains think, then that's not entirely true. While most languages are SVO (subject-verb-object), not all are. Japanese is SOV (subject-object-verb), while biblical Hebrew is/was VSO (verb-subject-object). I'm sure there are other variations.

EDIT: it just occurred to me that Japanese SVO is syntactically similar to Forth/RPN.

Forth :) It's been like 30 years since I the last time I wrote a Forth program that was more than 10 lines long---fond memories.

Not to mention passive contructions are way overused (oops, I just used one). At least if the sentence mentions the acting subject, an active construction is shorter and less stuffy.

That moment when you want to respond to an 18-year-old comment because the commenter was Wrong On The Internet, except that trying to correct it is even more absurdly futile than usual.

I think this is good advice for bloggers and journalists, but not for novelists or poets.

[flagged]

There are benefits to writing well besides increasing your audience.

Paul Graham illustrates in his post, “Good Writing”.[1]

“How does that help the writer? Because the writer is the first reader.”

This is also supported by Graham’s post “Writes and Write-Nots”[2]

“To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard.”

I don’t take Paul Graham’s word as gospel, but I have yet to find any contradictory stance, let alone one that’s been useful to me.

1: https://paulgraham.com/goodwriting.html 2: https://www.paulgraham.com/writes.html

Huh? It's trivially easy to write a Reddit post that gets thousands of readers. A mid tier YouTube scriptwriter can reach tens of millions of readers/listeners every week. A well-written Instagram comment can receive millions of views in a matter of days.

If you're content to remain nameless then you can reach millions of readers.

> If you're content to remain nameless then you can reach millions of readers.

Why should namelessness help? None of the examples you mention seem to require it.

Sorry, I would have more accurately said "if you're willing to piggyback on a larger creator's channel", which typically but not necessarily involves near-anonymity, and where one doesn't need to have a famous name.

But clarity and brevity, though a good beginning, are only a beginning. By themselves, they remain bare and bleak.

When Calvin Coolidge, asked by his wife what the preacher had preached on, replied, “Sin,” and, asked what the preacher had said, replied, “He was against it,” he was brief enough. But one hardly envies Mrs. Coolidge.

Adams gives good advice. However, no one will remember you if you write that way.

Writing isn’t about being remembered. It’s about helping others remember the ideas themselves.

Well he is certainly remembered by many.

Ah yes, the Ozymandias approach to writing.

pierceday.metalabel.com/aphone

Which explains the rise of rap music?

Active voice. Minimum word count. That’s it, unless you’re Paul Graham.

Spoiler: You are not Paul Graham.

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