The problem is (imo) that he's writing for himself and not an audience. It reads like a stream-of-consciousness journal entry, not a thoughtful attempt at relaying information to another mind. A good start would be learning to self-edit; the length could be cut significantly with no real loss of content.
What's particularly aggravating is that he knows, more or less, what clear, concise writing is (cf. his discussion of "classic style") and goes out of his way to not write like that. Yes, I read his justification. No, it's not good.
Someone is going to chime in by saying that I must be wrong because his articles frequently reach the HN frontpage. But correlation is not causation. The actual information content is generally really good – that's why they're popular. But they'd be even better with more attention to the mechanics of writing.
Concise writing sometimes cut away important information that cannot be conveyed in a concise manner.
It's like a sonata where we have a favourite part. Why don't we just play that part?
This is not an argument against editing or improving the information density.
Re:Some thoughts on writing
by paulpauper on Monday December 13, 2021 @09:53PM
(#29547644)
Concise writing does not go viral like long writing does. I have observed that longer articles have more success even if few people read them in their entirety. Slate Star Codex articles are often long and go viral.
Re:Some thoughts on writing
by paulpauper on Monday December 13, 2021 @09:49PM
(#29547622)
That is partly why it was a success. Good writing does not need to be exciting or catchy. Journalists are always trying to set up the reader's expectations with charged language and then the article fails to meet those expectations.
Re:Some thoughts on writing
by AlexCoventry on Monday December 13, 2021 @11:45PM
(#29548336)
I don't go there for the writing style, I go there for the stories and the interesting perspectives on things I care about.
Having read some of Dan Luu's other prose I think this is a bit unfair. The sort of meta analysis of writing always comes off a bit navel gazy I suppose, but I don't think you have put his post in context with some of the other things he's written. In those entries of his blog I always find the prose flows quite nicely.
Perhaps submitters need to consider that not every single post of dan's merits an HN post? or the voters or what ever else drives the front page algorithm
>The "improve writing" goal is because I found my writing annoyingly awkward and wanted to fix that. I frequently wrote sentences or paragraphs that seemed clunky to me, like when you misspell a word and it looks wrong no matter how you try re-spelling it.
That's because your writing is so pedantically subdued that it doesn't resemble the ways that humans actually communicate.