If you want constructive advice: try to write in the same way that you would talk. Shallowly, that means read your writing out loud – what Flaubert called his 'gueulade' – or, even better, vice versa: write down your spoken thoughts. More deeply it means not saying anything that you wouldn't say in real life. Get to the point, ditch the fluff, treat it like a (garrulous, one-sided) phone call. Have your point constantly at the front of your mind, and only say what's absolutely necessary to explain or justify it. It will improve your writing immensely.
Oh, and read Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language': https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli.... If pressed for time, then particularly the last third or so. His advice is the best you can ever hear as a writer. Reflect on your good fortune: by writing this, you've now identified what makes good writing.
> I didn’t seek this out.
Oh, come on.
> Ultimately it is compliance - someone called it aggressive compliance, I can't really comment on that.
Hmm, I suppose either the house style mandates what I would consider extremely poor writing (I won’t belabour the reasons), or the house style mandates some broadly formal style and the challenge is to write well within it. If the former, I suppose you should take my comments as applying to the house style and not your own writing ability; if the latter, I’d more or less reiterate what I said, and I doubt any non-insane style guide would, say, forbid you to use plain Anglo-Saxon words, vary your sentence length, write grammatically, etc.
In either case I admit I find it very bewildering to reconcile your well written comment with the solecisms and illiteracies that post was littered with*, or to make sense of your coming here to read and grow upset at criticism of a post which – given your now-evident possession of a brain stem – you must surely have known was atrociously written.
Thanks for your civil response, and for your taking my comment in the same spirit. It wasn't meant as a personal attack, no. It was meant to be an impersonal attack: all I knew of you was that piece of writing, and that was all I wanted to consider. Hopefully** my comment contributes to better instructing whoever and/or whatever was or were responsible for that lobotomised dross!
* With which that post… **Yeah, yeah, ok
I spend more time than I’d like adding in positive language around everything because people overreact to anything not super positive. So to avoid people misinterpreting my comments, Ill usually add in lots of “a+,” blue ribbon, superpowers, etc blargh.
I appreciate you writing your article and participating in this thread but think we’re part of the problem.
If people are better able to accept criticism, then we’ll get more reality. Until then, I’m more likely to comment positively or not comment at all on the very likely chance that the author jumps into a thread and spazzes out on me.
I think you were trying to empathize, but I don’t think a master’s in English is necessarily useful for the topics brought up in this thread. Without more context (school, projects, interests, performance) I don’t think there’s any correlation between masters in English and ability to read and write well.
[0] Not in a Dr Jekyll scenario, not even if in some Parfit-esque farce their brain were indexterously bisected with cheese wire and not either half but the intervenient dribble of corpus callosum attained sentience would said brain-dribble even in its admitted abjection be left with the deficit in neuronal voltage absolutely required to bring that tripe into existence, no more than I could fake a Pollock, or Infinite Jest, or Finnegans Wake.
I'll step in to defend the OP because I know where they are coming from: your article is a drop in an ocean of a certain genre of article that HN has encountered over the years and we've devised certain aphorisms to describe them, and by association, describe the authors.
One of those is that the author is complaining, praising, making a statement about something that shows they are severely out of touch with reality. Usually it's some kind of a self-congratulatory or self-aggrandizing thing that completely glosses over red flags - like say somebody building a very eco-unsustainable house in British Columbia's mountain ranges while fawning over how eco-friendly they are in the details, missing the larger scale of problems they are (intentionally?) ignoring. Being flush with tech money does funny things to people.
Often times, however, we've seen the opposite, "Our Great Journey", which has been parodied over the years elsewhere, not just HN. It describes a PR puff piece style that glosses over the fact that a company has failed/not been profitable in it's mission and is being sold off to another company. The founders, of course, would never dare say it in those direct terms, and so the PR speak is written, copied, and eventually parodied.
And eventually we arrive to what OP is commenting on, where the language used to describe rather mediocre and boring jobs is flourished with fanciful titles/words (like "empathy superpowers"). It begs to be mocked because it's such an extravagant literal style that, at this point, we can't take seriously anymore. We've seen too much of this bullshit and it cannot be unseen. We've seen too many associations of this kind of phrasing with people who really are out of touch and whatever plights they have should at worst be ridiculed, at best be completely ignored.
Basically, it's all so tiresome.
As for your post, there's not enough meat on it. Using social media as a launchpad to talk about "toxic positivity" is fairly benign - you can find just about any stupid shit on Instagram to talk about and segue into whatever moral grandstanding you want to convey. You can find both for- and against- examples. Hell, you don't even need to give examples, you can just say such-and-such is happening, and people will nod and go with it, because who are they to know better, right?
And, let's be honest, this is only an unusually pure rendition of that genre of writing: formulaic, saccharine but detectably hollow, devoid of substance, strung together with stale clichés, seemingly written to typify an attitude (one of cultish overfriendliness without boundaries) more than what we would traditionally recognise as a 'point'.
The discomfiting feeling you get when reading it is the feeling that the author doesn't care about any of this. And that you don't blame her. It's an egg laid by a caged hen, full of sad hormones and stress. You can feel it in the way that there's nothing there above the phrasal or (at most) sentential level: no overarching purpose, every sentence out for itself with no overarching strategy from above, like an Elizabethan commonplace book full of random helpful platitudes.
It's why I recommended Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language'. I have never read bad writing, truly bad writing, produced by someone speaking sincerely and plainly of a subject they care about, saying something about it which they think ought to be said.