Writing Rules: Advice From The Times on Writing Well | Hacker News Reader

Writing Rules: Advice From The Times on Writing Well

learning.blogs.nytimes.com

100 points001sky19 comments

Nouns formed from other parts of speech are called nominalizations. Academics love them; so do lawyers, bureaucrats and business writers. I call them “zombie nouns” because they cannibalize active verbs, suck the lifeblood from adjectives and substitute abstract entities for human beings.

\o/

for me, this was the most illuminating bit of advice given in this article. the source is very informative:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/zombie-nouns...

It's also a focal instruction in _Style: Towards Clarity And Grace_, itself probably the most nerd-friendly guide to writing (I couldn't read any 3 pages without thinking of some new program I could write to automatically "improve" my writing).

Another pet peeve of mine is going the other way: making verbs out of other parts of speech- particularly nouns:

We'll impact that as soon as possible.

Or as Calvin and Hobbes used to say:

Verbing weirds language.

For example, when did "ask" become a noun? Is that something they teach in business school? ;)

On the subject of “writing rules”:

The submitted article is titled “Writing Rules! Advice From The Times on Writing Well”, but (as of this writing) the title appears here on HN as “Writing Rules Advice From The Times on Writing Well”.

Arguably, the modified title is readable, and largely conveys the meaning of the original article.

But certainly the run-on converted title is quite different than the source. I wonder if the HN parser would do well to, instead of simply stripping all exclamation marks as a matter of principle, at least convert mid-title exclamations to a hyphen, to indicate the separation within the original title?

E.g. “Writing Rules – Advice From The Times on Writing Well”

(Even then, “Rules” loses its original implication as an excited verb to instead become a noun, but this particular confusion may be unavoidable.)

If only my high school and college teachers had given advice like this. Instead, we were forced to follow the Edwardian rules of Strunk & White and teachers generally looked down upon any non-standard form of literature, including the science fiction I was reading at the time -- books by Wolfe, Delany, LeGuin and Gibson (this was in the late '80s).

As for the suggestion in the article to follow the voice in your head, I learned to do this by writing extensive travel journals in the 1990s and further developed it through blogging.

I also wonder how the introduction of email has impacted writing. I believe email helped develop my own voice and editing skills -- when I first started using it in the mid-90s, it probably increased my monthly written output as much as 10x (I had written letters in longhand before then). It also exposed me to the written "voices" of friends, colleagues and strangers.

> the voice in your head

I recommend "The Writer's Voice" (Alvarez) for more on this.

It's a really good post that speaks to good style. What bleaks me out about an industry in which syntax permeates everything, is how much we tank at basic grammar, spelling and vocabulary. And then there're the hipster buzzwords that makes many cringe -

Friend me/text me. On premise. Ping me. Your very clever. That effects me.

Practical advise is out there.

http://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Blog.aspx?id=4b6816fd-ca1d-4e46-...

http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/free-guides.html

One day we could have "compilers" to catch most your/you're, their/there/they're, effect/affect errors, but then what about the dynamic typists!?

Though I don't have any problem with new short phrases like "text me" or even "friend me" (though I'm not sure just how long that one will hang around since it seems rather FB-specific). "Calling" wasn't always something you did with a phone, after all. And "send me a text message" sounds so stiff compared to going from "call me" to "text me." So I don't think you'll be able to effect change there.

My iTouch can't friend you on my Facebook, so I texted you a reminder to pin my latest blog.

The verb "calling" is a great example of how new meanings can overtake old ones to the point that what used to sound faddish and trendy becomes normal and accepted. "Calling" was a thing you did prior to the telephone, but you wouldn't just "call someone". You'd call on someone, or make a call, both of which now sound relatively formal and stiff.

Sorry to be pedantic, but "advise" is a verb; the correct form would be "advice", which is a noun.

Don't apologise - the irony of what I did there isn't lost on me.

"there're" is cringe worthy...

I really like extended metaphors. When done well, they tell you more about something, in terms of what you already know. They can also be affecting (a pedagogically oft-quoted example: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171781).

Another technique is reviving a dead metaphor, in which you extend a metaphor which has become a cliche, abstracted from its original concrete meaning. Like the word "dead".

Both these techniques can be used as cheesy special effects, but when used well, they affect you without they themselves being noticed.

I believe the title should be: From the Times, Advice on Writing Well

Yes. I misread the original title as meaning "advice from the Times of Writing Well, when writing well still meant something." :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com