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Comment by Chocobean | Hacker News Reader

agreed. I wonder why some people write that way. It's very difficult to write in second person successfully, because as soon as one presents information that is inconsistent with how the actual reader feels, the rest of the argument is nullified. Yes, it sounded silly when the writer tried to speak for me, in particular, when he knows nothing about me.

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The pronoun "one" has mostly fallen out of use ("One starts to feel...") and the usual substitute in modern English is "you". It doesn't literally mean that the writer is talking about the reader.

I think in spoken English this is the case. However, using the more formal "one" in writing, even on a blog, is a good way to clear up any misunderstanding a reader might have. Though the use of "you" is more and more accepted in everyday situations, clearly the use of "you" instead of "one" caused some readers of this post some problems. In writing, one should try to be as clear as possible to get one's point across to the widest variety of readers, unless one is trying to obfuscate one's point on purpose.

kragen's point is that most people don't know how or when to do so. I think most of us would agree that it would be best for everyone to suddenly get much better at written English, but it's unlikely to occur.

Ah, okay. Thanks for clearing that up.

Close enough.

I end up writing in second person a lot. In fact, some of my comments in this very thread ended up in second person by the end. I really need to watch for this! I'm not the original blog author, but thanks for pointing this out - it's something I'm going to be watching for in my own writing from now on. (I'm kind of surprised I never noticed how bad it can sound.)

I think I fall into this trap when I want to generalize about my experience with others. For instance, if I observe some common behavior in virtually everyone I know, I might start saying "when you're such-and-such-ing...." because it seems easier than constantly reminding the reader that I'm simply generalizing based on my experience. However, I can see your point - that this really could be messing with the people who read it who maybe aren't directly my target audience. This might change my writing style significantly. :)

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