Hacker News Reader

Comment by chasing | Hacker News Reader

(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..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com