[HN Gopher] The Problem with Writing-Style Advice
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The Problem with Writing-Style Advice
Author : CrocodileStreet
Score : 14 points
Date : 2021-01-18 21:20 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (metaphorhacker.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (metaphorhacker.net)
| [deleted]
| npilk wrote:
| Ironically, it's hard for me to take this manifesto seriously
| because of the author's poor grammar. I found the awkward and/or
| incorrect structure of many sentences distracting and ultimately
| gave up after the second or third section. This doesn't
| invalidate the author's ideas, but it does suggest that writing
| style matters to at least some degree.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| The author might not like Pinker's writing, but this hardly
| speaks against Pinker's advice. I have a feeling he read the
| first chapter of _The Sense of Style_ and decided the whole thing
| is bullshit _because_ it 's about style and not substance.
|
| But the author clearly _accepts_ the need for some level of
| style. The blog theme they use has a readable column-width, a
| table of contents, etc. And the advice they give fits with Pinker
| 's. For example, "Rich outlines" is relevant to chapter 5 of
| Pinker, "Arcs of Coherence."
|
| > I want to get some information from them and I want to get
| examples and counterexamples for the points they make. I want
| them to get to the point.
|
| Pinker's book is fairly dense on the advice front, and _chock
| full_ of examples. Including ones about academic writing that
| involve shorter sentences _and_ more clarity, like rewording
| "Participants read assertions whose veracity was either affirmed
| or denied by the subsequent presentation of an assessment word"
| into "We presented participants with a sentence, followed by the
| word 'true' or 'false'."
|
| > The first advice you need to give to an academic writer is not
| to read a book on stylish writing but rather to read how people
| in their field are writing. Because those are their potential
| readers....
|
| Sure, but they don't have to be the _only_ readers, and jargon
| and bad style make a community insular. And beside, even for
| those readers, the point (particularly _beyond_ chapter 1) is
| that conveying meaning efficiently requires sound structure.
|
| One gets the feeling that the author likes jargon and density for
| its own sake, or because it makes the author feel like a member
| of the community. They seem to assume that better-styled writing
| will necessarily be less scrupulous:
|
| > clear explicit structure and moderately shorter sentences. No
| stories, no metaphors, no flourishes. No avoidance of passives or
| reduction of adverbs. No worries about technical language. Just
| these two. They will not only make the academic writing easier to
| read, they will also make it more scrupulous.
|
| Okay, maybe _stories_ aren 't appropriate in academic papers, nor
| inexact metaphors, but so what? That's not a matter of style.
|
| And why _just_ these two? Would the author 's thesis be better
| stated as "worry about structure and concision _first_ "? Because
| I don't think Pinker's book would disagree with that.
| [deleted]
| ashton314 wrote:
| I feel like the author homogenizes all of academic writing. The
| needs of the English department are different than the needs of
| the computer science department. While there are a few universal
| virtues that all writing should strive for to be good, I think
| the domain of discourse is an indispensable factor in determining
| your style.
| Veen wrote:
| I find it hard to reconcile what the author says in this article
| and what they say in an earlier article entitled "How to actually
| write a sentence", which is an explanation of how cohesion and
| coherence contribute to well-formed sentences, a topic Pinker
| spends a couple of chapters on in Sense of Style.
|
| https://metaphorhacker.net/2020/02/how-to-actually-write-a-s...
| ajarmst wrote:
| I don't accept the premise that you must choose between stylish
| and informative writing, but the argument fails at the outset.
| Complaining that Pinker (one assumes especially in his _A Sense
| of Style_ , which I recommend without reservation) writes poorly
| for academics by focusing on his writing for a non-academic
| audience. If you desire a more "academic" style, Pinker is quite
| capable of providing it, if you look at his journal articles (the
| abstract to his _Formal Models of Abstract Learning_ at
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001002...
| should provide sufficient evidence of his familiarity with the
| norms). One important aspect of a writer's style is how it is
| directed toward the audience, and Pinker is frequently (and
| Gladwell is always) not writing for an academic audience. This
| post also has a fundamental begging-the-question problem: the
| academic writing it describes is not notable for an absence of
| style, but for a very specific terse style that is difficult to
| do well.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I think I agree. I also think it's weird to laud academic
| writing as it is often quite bad, having a tendency to go on
| and on with some pointless complexity (do you feel like a real
| academic when you write "not unreasonable"? I claim that
| ordinarily the only nuance between this and "reasonable" is
| that writing one makes you feel clever).
|
| Historically academic writing has been constrained by page
| limits (compare papers written by Euler to Gauss). But as
| publishing has moved online and expensive this has become less
| of an issue. And if you wrote a book there were far fewer
| constraints on length.
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