Comment by lsc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lsc | Hacker News Reader

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From a business writing standpoint? that whole sentence is superfluous. The whole thing is an insertion of humility, something that is important when speaking about yourself to other nerds, but is essentially social fluff.

My takeaway is primarily not that I did verbosity wrong, though certainly that comment wasn't right, but that the verbosity itself is the problem.

Take, for example one of the bits of writing I'm most proud of:

http://www.nostarch.com/download/xen_ch7.pdf

We had a real editor, and my co-author had significant writing skill, but even so: Look at the Scheduling for providers section; that was mostly me.

This is about what I had been aiming for in my business communications, and while I still think it's a reasonable bit of writing for a semi-technical audience, it is far too verbose for a business email.

If I was sending that same passage to a business person, I suspect the optimal format would be something like:

"We will allocate CPU based on how much ram the user purchases."

The rest is technical details and fluff. When dealing with a businessperson, the technical details are my job, not something they care about.

I think that my primary self-destructive impulse here is that I want to throw out technical details, in part to prove that I actually know something. I need to restrain that bit of ego, as worrying about the technical details is what I'm (hopefully) getting paid to do.

I usually write whatever I would say, then go over it after and take out any words or phrases that might be superfluous, or that can possibly be removed. Wholesale removal of extraneous stuff goes a long way towards making yourself clearer. I'll occasionally leave things in that I feel add to my "voice", but more often than not, if a word can be removed, it is removed.

--- becomes ---

I write whatever I would say, then go over it and take out anything superfluous. It makes things clearer.

Struggling typists prefer conciseness.

Here is a simple improvement that should help a lot. Write everything in the active voice. This will make your language less "pretty", but more understandable. Doubly so when talking to people with a short attention span.

Let me rewrite your first paragraph to show the difference.

From a business writing standpoint? that whole sentence is superfluous. The whole thing is an insertion of humility, something that is important when speaking about yourself to other nerds, but is essentially social fluff.

vs

That whole sentence is superfluous from a business writing standpoint. It is an insertion of humility. Social fluff that would be important when speaking about yourself to other nerds.

> Write everything in the active voice.

Every verb in the original paragraph was already in the active voice. I'm not sure whether your replacement is better or worse than the original, but the differences have nothing to do with active vs. passive voice.

(You are far from alone in saying "active" where you mean something else. See, e.g., http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/grammar/passives.html and the various Language Log articles linked from there.)

You are right, I was merely using the term as I've seen it used.

My real point was that he does not organize sentences by the standard subject-verb-object. This makes the sentences more complex. That complexity makes it harder for people to understand what is said. It would be OK to do that occasionally, but he did it with every single sentence!

For me that pdf chapter example was very hard to read.

>For me that pdf chapter example was very hard to read.

Huh. Interesting. I often value other people's opinions based on my perception of their skill. Going through your comment history, you do have a very terse, very readable style, so it's probably worth my time to look over that chapter.

The whole thing suffers from the apparent fact that I had been reading a lot of Nietzsche at the time. Man. "The will to power" was very clearly a collection of notes that he did not intend to publish that were organized and published by lesser men. Not something one ought to use to calibrate one's aesthetics.

Hm. I need to read, perhaps, more Churchill. "Broadly speaking, short words are best, and the old words, when short, are best of all." Though, if I remember correctly, the context of that quote is a paragraph on the merits of germanic vs. latin derived words, his thesis, if I recall, was that Germanic words are generally better than those derived from Latin. That man could write; His work was a joy to read, but it also effectively communicated his ideas. I like his speaking style, too; Especially in contrast to the 'uncontrolled rage' style that was popular with the other warlords of his day, something my modern sensibilities associate with comical powerlessness.

You have written two comments in this single discussion that begin with a single paragraph saying "Huh. Interesting."

This sort of habit, if noticed by others, can look bad.

(I've been caught out in similar things myself.)

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