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Comment by ritchiea | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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".

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).

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