Write less | Hacker News Reader

Write less

getnashty.com

165 pointsbgnm200097 comments

The ironic thing in this instance is that in a way the author is clearly negating his point by needing to show the crossed-out text. Imagine you had followed the link, and the only text was "Fewer words create a more powerful message."

We would likely feel cheated at some level, like "That's it? How did one sentence get a whole HN link?" In a way we're conditioned to expect a bunch of garbage filler that we merely skim, and because that's what's in demand right now it's what authors are incentivized to provide.

I came here to say this. Brevity is not the goal. Mindless brevity destroys context. Concision is the goal. Bake the context into your prose.

If you can't be concise, don't attempt to be brief. It will only annoy your readers.

The reality is that you need BOTH.

This is how modern news articles are written: http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/24/4698382/second-lifes-stran...

Some people will skim and get the information. Some people will read and get entertainment. Some people want the details, because they need a deeper understanding. Some people want a high level overview, because they already understand things and just want the information.

See also: Richard Feynman's books on physics.

A good example to prove the OP.

Your Second Life article probably has some interesting things to say, I wouldn't know, I didn't read it. Instead I clicked the link, scrolled and scrolled and before I'd even got to the bottom I'd calculated it would take me about half an hour of my life to read the thing.

I don't want to invest half an hour of my life in learning about someone's blow-by-blow account of their Second Life experience (I'd question anybody who does and point them to one of the numerous HN articles on procrastination/wasted time). An article that long devoted only to Second Life (condescension aside, there really are more important things, honestly) seems pretentious and serving the authors Ego more than the readers curiosity.

Richard Feynman however, the secrets of the universe and world around us, yes, I would like to learn more about that.

When writing about technical subjects, however, you often need redundancy. People sometimes misunderstand concepts. When they do, the only thing that will alert them to their error is the second explanation crashing into the first.

When writing technically you need to be specific and redundant.

You have to say the same thing in several different ways. Everyone has their own ways of thinking and understanding so you must be as clear as possible and provide several ways to express the same idea. This will allow different readers to understand the same subject.

I am going to tell you about the 3 phases of technical writing.

You tell them what you are going to tell them. You tell them. You tell them what you just told them.

I just told you about the 3 phases of technical writing.

I recently came to appreciate this as a novice programmer learning Lisp. After working through the initial chapters of 'Practical Common Lisp' and 'Land of Lisp', I settled on DS Touretzky's 'Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation'.

The pace is very comforting for a beginner and the reiterations are meticulous in detail and yet concise. For any beginner, the joy and confidence from being able to grok simple concepts and finishing all exercises provides the impetus to move on to tomes like SICP, 'On Lisp' and 'Let Over Lambda'. I would highly recommend technical authors to study the prose and content layout in this book.

I recall a story of EB White who condensed his lessons so compactly that he didn't have enough material to fill a classroom, so he would just repeat each concept three times.

Comprehension is what saves readers time. Write as much as it's needed for your readers to understand.

If I opened a page and fell on author's last one-liner, I'd be inclined to dispute the statement. It's void of context and arguments and we can surely find countless examples to contradict the notion.

Fewer doesn't mean simpler. Maths or programming expressions can be terse, yet so packed full of information that they take hours to decipher. We can find the equivalent in literature.

Sometimes to get your point across fast you have to use longer, yet more accessible sentences. To save readers' time, just write simpler, not shorter.

Bingo.

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." - Einstein

A couple of other rules of thumb I employ: use active voice, and avoid qualifiers.

Counterpoint (specifically in the field of advertising), titled "Do long copy ads work? Let’s ask some of the greatest names in advertising history" [1]

Answer at the end: "Every one of the authors I have quoted is a giant in the field of advertising... And they all agree about the [positive] effectiveness of long copy ads."

[1] http://www.realityassociates.com/Articles/Art-LongCopy.htm

Brevity is good for some things.

A long description full of descriptive adjectives is absolutely critical for certain types of writing that require you to literally paint a picture of scenery, emotion, and dialogue.

Know what you're writing.

Brevity isn't always a time-saver in technical writing, either. Sometimes it's confusing and ambiguous.

Just consider that your words are real things that other people are going to encounter. Those people are often likely to be stressed, confused, or even angry – especially if you're making a web page.

Is your user someone who has a problem that they want to solve right now? Then be as clear as you possibly can. Don't try to be funny or clever. Don't even try to be exceptionally brief!

The OP has the right mindset but the advice is not very helpful. It's not just overall number of words, but which words you remove. In general, you should cut adjectives.

As C.S. Lewis notes: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/04/c-s-lewis-on-writing.ht...

> In writing. Don't use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was "terrible," describe it so that we'll be terrified. Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, "Please will you do my job for me."

Here's some advice from Woodrow Wilson that should strike a note with programmers who write modular code:

http://books.google.com/books?id=zjcUAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA268&dq=%2...

> The best teacher I ever had used to say to me, “When you frame a sentence don’t do it as if you were loading a shotgun but as if you were loading a rifle. Don’t fire in such a way and with such a load that while you hit the thing you aim at, you will hit a lot of things in the neighborhood besides; but shoot with a single bullet and hit that one thing alone.”

Adjectives can be very useful. Let's take delightful.

Imagine one is writing a ’50 Shades’-style S&M story.

He ran through the previous night's activities. There was the brutal whipping, followed by a caning. He was forced to drink the urine of a dog, and then she stretched his arms out in agonising pain.

"That sounds brutal," Melanie said with her eyelids agape. She had never understood the appeal of kinky sex.

"No, it was delightful really," he said with a big, perverse grin on his face.

Lewis' suggested rule against adjectives in writing is fine, but sometimes they are very useful for contrast or in dialogue.

The adjectives you use can build up the character of a person, and can form part of their personal idiolect.

Lewis' advice is fine and good, but one ought not to extrapolate from a rule against applying adjectives lazily in place of actual description to a rule against using adjectives at all.

> Fewer words, create a more powerful message.

Fewer commas, create a sentence that makes more sense.

Also needs a string.replace("less", "fewer") in v1

You're nitpicking the grammar in a crossed out paragraph?

For my recent technical book, I spent 3 weeks writing over 200 pages and then 3 weeks editing to get the book down to under 80 pages.

It's funny because I then had several complaints (from non-buyers particularly) that the book cost too much for an 80 page book.

Someone can certainly save their money and reproduce the experience of the book by spending a couple of painful weeks combing through documentation and hitting their head against walls. OR, they can spend less than what they probably make in an hour and get the same knowledge in 80 pages.

My target audience was people that value their time far more than their money, so that's why I spent so much effort making the book as succinct as possible.

As an aside: I'm really glad I put a price on the book. Initially I was tempted to have it be "pay what you want" so it would be more accessible, but that would have devalued it I think. Instead, I've offered a special cheaper option for students, junior developers, and those in countries where the book would be prohibitively expensive. So far, I've had about 50 people take me up on that.

The book has been successful enough to give me another month where I don't have to take contracts and I can focus on creating more content. If I hadn't charged sufficiently for it, then I'd have to pause everything and do contract work.

So, spending that extra 3 weeks making the book shorter and more focused was a win for both me and my target customers.

For anyone curious, here's the book: http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-salt-stack-a...

IMO, your book is far too expensive. As a casual interested in dev-ops (surely your target market), I'm completely turned off by you asking old-academia style prices of an ebook. I appreciate you're charging to cover the opportunity cost of your consulting, but presumably you're also aware that pricing it on your perceived value is a suboptimal strategy. Have you considered reducing the price to open up a larger market, and if you have, what is your justification for not doing so?

Sometimes it's good to support a position with argumentation. Brevity is saying the same thing with fewer words. In this case, the blog post is actually saying less. That may work for something obvious, but take care before applying this rule universally.

Yes. A simple assertion does little to convince me of anything.

I do believe that the point he is trying to make is not that you should say the same thing but with fewer words, but rather that you should say ONLY what you NEED to say. ie. Don't beat around the bush!

(And this is where anyone with a background in writing sighs.)

From what I understand writing a story to be read is not the same comparison to writing a story for information sharing via the internet. It's all about your audience. The audience who picks up a book wants to sit and read. Sometimes at length.

tl;dr Writing blog posts and writing stories are comparing apples to oranges.

Couldn't agree more - I hope its obvious my post is regarding content such as blogs, articles, and web content (based on myself as the author). Not stories.

Maybe you should have said that. :-)

Not the case at all. Writing blog posts, writing stories, writing emails, all share the same principle: use only the words necessary to convey the message.

Just because story-writing has a lot more description does not mean that those words aren't necessary. For example, for Hamlet to simply say "I am conflicted about my current situation and am contemplating suicide", does not nearly give the same nuance or insight into what his thought process is as "To be, or not to be, that is the question:/Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer/The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,/Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,/And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep".

tl;dr the goal of most forms of writing is to convey a message with just the right amount of words

While your point is reasonable, particularly to modern style, I think your Hamlet example is far more "Show, don't tell" than any useful demonstration of preference for brevity.

I disagree, if you read through the first paragraph in spite of the strikethrough text you see that the author is talking about user experience. Web designers constantly have to find non-verbal ways of communicating with users because on the web pages with lots of text go unread. He's not talking to an audience of writers, he's talking to an audience of designers & product people.

Thank you, you are 100% correct.

They're both correct. It's the old Pascal line -- "I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn't have time" -- which your post does a decent job of illustrating.

So really the title "Write less" is the misleading part. Write more, not less. Just remember that good writing, like good code, requires iteration and refactoring.

This many times. Writing is easy, but like programming, we spend most of our time debugging and editing, pair writing works well also, or at least have a very honest critical reviewer to depend on.

Plan to throw one away: it's easier than finally throwing your first one away after it goes flakey. Works for code, works for writing. Writing it the second time is quicker than the first time, and the result is almost invariably better (and oftern shorter).

Oh, I'm aware of his intended audience. I wrote that as a snarky way of poking a little fun at the fact that he somewhat inelegantly states a precept which -- as noted in other comments in this thread -- is kind of "Writing 101."

"Elements of Style", in Principles of Composition #17: "Omit needless words".

You also see that the author doesn't know how to use commas.

Taking writing advice from someone who doesn't know how to use commas is like taking cooking advice from someone who doesn't know how to boil an egg.

Or grammar...

> The less words you use

I was pleased to see he figured it out by the final iteration.

>Fewer words

"Perfection is Achieved Not When There Is Nothing More to Add, But When There Is Nothing Left to Take Away"

I am hardly a disciple of it, but most writing guides encourage brevity, and the notion that writing is easy, while editing is hard. Every word added should add more than just length to the work. Okay, I could remove that second sentence. And the third. And..

I think v4 has a very different message from v1-3. 1-3 seem to be saying value your readers time by writing as succinctly as possible whereas v4 says a shorter message is more powerful. This may sometimes be the case, but often it is not. Many of the most powerful speeches use repetition and deliberate at length on their message in order to emphasise it. Shortening them would probably have made the message less powerful.

The last sentence leaves out very important points made in the struck-through versions about valuing the time of your audience. I am currently looking for more information-dense delivery mechanisms, among other things. The struck-through versions provide vivid illustration of the point, which provides a kind of information-density. Words are not your only medium, not even in copy, much less online generally.

> Write less

Write more, succinctly.

I disagree.

You understand my context, though, right?

Write as little as possible, but not less. Consider your audience and purpose: if you write too little, it can only be understood by those who already understand it.

The Gettysburg address shows that less can be more. But, too little is nothing at all: http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/

Stephen King's rule is that the second draft of his book should be ten percent shorter compared with the first draft.

Source: his biography On Writing (http://www.amazon.com/Writing-10th-Anniversary-Memoir-Craft/...)

If you're going to make this point, I like the story of the Oxford literature professor (probably a reader or don or some other weird title, but professor in US terms) who walked into class on his first day and said:

"Omit. Needless. Words."

And then:

"Omit. Needless. Words."

And then:

"Omit. Needless. Words."

And then walked out. End of first lecture.

"Eschew surplusage", in the words of Mark Twain.

"Omit needless words" is from Strunk & White's Elements of Style

Yes but he follows it with a long paragraph saying the same thing in lots of different, less clear ways. Repeating those three words three times is, in fact, far more effective.

Id like to point out that this is similar to the idea of compression. Lossless compression is ideal, but you should not confuse lossy compression for lossless compression. To illustrate, going from v3 to v4 is very lossy. You lose the reason why shorter messages are better.

Start with a simple statement and follow up with the detail.

If you read a good newspaper article you will see it starts off with a paragraph containing most of the detail of the story and then expands on it later allowing the user to skim.

Blog readers, like newspaper readers, are viewing a number of stories and reading some of them just to get the gist and others to get the detail. So the headline is there to grab their attention and then the first paragraph has to give enough detail that they can go away with most of the details and move on. You can then expand later in the page for those that want a greater detail. It's quite a skill and one that journalist and editors work hard at.

Ironically though, without the author's previous revisions (saying the same thing multiple times) the article wouldn't deliver the message as well.

The "revisions" aren't really revisions; they're part of the article. If you have the proper context, you don't need to be verbose. For example, if I go to your startup's website, I don't need to be told that "Company X is a lightweight web application that..."; if you have visuals and a context, information like "lightweight web application" is redundant.

My own experiment in brevity: the Pitch Blurb.

(Ironically long) explanation at http://thinkinghard.com/blog/PitchBlurb.html.

Lots of examples in one web page at http://thinkinghard.com/blog/index.html.

Brilliant illustration.

Terse writing has more punch, true. And for some media and most audiences, that's what you want. Most authors use a lot of weaselly filler (like "most" and "a lot") but not every interesting idea can be adequately conveyed by a pithy sentence. If people keep that in mind, we'll all benefit from better writing.

There's a flip side of course Just like there always is Writing, whether text or source Is about tradeoffs, not the biz

Of perfect solutions. For example, you will find That a rhyming passage will stay in mind Far longer than a tweet.

This isn't a statement about grammar, or how to structure your writing pieces. Its about articles / blogs I stumble upon (from hackernews) which are needlessly long. I want to read something, understand the message the author is trying to convey, and I want to move on.

I absolutely hate that "don't move" kudos device. Terrible, obnoxious design.

"The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter."

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TimeToMakeItShort

There's an obvious tradeoff between speed and information. People tend to be biased towards information (writing too much), but that doesn't mean that "write less" is good advice.

Same thing could be said about lectures in college. I'm amazed at how much professors can expand on for a simple little concept making the idea more convoluted than it should be.

I found that good books describe things in rich details. It is hard to compress a sentence without losing information.

"If I had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter." —Blaise Pascal

"Omit words."

"Omit unnecessary words."

eschew surplusage

Why use big words when grandiloquent locutions suffice?

Like a good wine words tend to grow with time.

(I believe the parent quoted Twain.)

This is the right amount of brevity, IMO. "Omit words" doesn't give you a hueristic about what to omit.

"Needless" gives a test you can apply to every word. "Omit words" sounds simpler, even obvious, but only because you know it's a shortened form of "omit needless words". We could shorten the advice to "simplify", but that doesn't give you the how.

If a word is needed, obviously you won't omit it.

It's a tongue in cheek response to the EoS quote ("Omit needless words"), not - devoid context - serious style guidance.

I hope everyone knows you're quoting "The Elements of Style" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style

... and I hope everyone is aware of both the virtues and the limits of that work.

I'm not. Care to enlighten me?

Virtues: A lot of the style rules are great guidelines.

Limitations:

minor:

Style rules shouldn't be followed when they make things awkward or harder to understand; that's more a problem with some readers than the book, but it's something to keep in mind...

less minor:

A lot of the grammar proscriptions are confused at best (and not followed by the authors themselves, in that work or others). Language Log has oodles of examples: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll

A fun parlor game: choose a claim from the book that you think the book itself follows. Then your opponent has 5 minutes to find a counter-example.

Very nice.

There was a good article in the Chronicle of Higher Education a while back:

http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/2549...

Note that Pullum is also the one who's probably written the most about this on LL, but certainly that's a nice consolidated case instead of a scattering of examples - thanks! :)

"Omit."

Write more, edit more.

This is missing a single word: "Sometimes."

I was waiting for this kind of message for months!

Fewer words are also easier to proofread.

comment more

"Omit needless words"

The irony is strong.

V5 less is more!

*be concise

whatever.

-bowerbird

you can downvote my "whatever" until the cows come home, but -- in the end -- that's what it'll all boil down to.

seriously, ya'll have already accumulated 57 comments on a piece that says "be brief", with a hidden qualifier of "to the greatest extent possible without losing the plot."

how many comments will it take you before you realize that you've been sent on a wild goose chase, chasing your tail?

and now i too have over-explained. and wasted _my_ time.

and undoubtedly will be docked a few more "karma" points, because some people don't wanna hear they've wasted time.

-bowerbird

From the guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

- Please don't sign comments, especially with your url. They're already signed with your username. If other users want to learn more about you, they can click on it to see your profile.

- Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

- Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.

We would be happy to have your participation in a discussion, but this method is boring, tiresome and uninteresting. If you're willing and capable of elevating your discourse a bit I'm sure we'd appreciate what you have to say, but if not, you may find other forums more inviting.

i'm not "complaining about being downmodded." it's funny. nor am i "baiting" anyone, even though i am highly amused.

and i think it's ironic that you totally missed the point that my "whatever" response is in keeping with the advice being offered by the article which is the thread's topic.

while, at the same time, 87 comments have now been posted. evidently, the "be brief" message did not register here...

and you say _i_ am the one who is "boring, tiresome, and uninteresting"? methinks the lady doth protest too much.

-bowerbird

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