[HN Gopher] 'Eliminate Every Superfluous Word': The New Document...
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'Eliminate Every Superfluous Word': The New Documentary, Hemingway
Author : lermontov
Score : 54 points
Date : 2021-04-03 04:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| pmichaud wrote:
| The article seems like a caricature of itself, but to the
| sentiment of the title: the devil's in the details.
|
| I think people tend to imagine Hemingway as spare prose and pithy
| sentences, and when they try to mimic their stereotype of him,
| they end up with dry prose and dead sentences. Real Hemingway had
| range, often wrote long, descriptive sentences. And here we find
| the devil:
|
| The trick isn't wringing your prose down to a clear, factual
| account. The trick is knowing in the first place what is
| "necessary" to convey the truth of whatever writing.
|
| "What literally occurred" is only one possible angle on this, and
| focus on that is neither necessary nor sufficient to create
| artful prose. Depending on the piece you may focus on what
| occurred, the feeling and mood of it, the reader's relationship
| to any of it, or the questions any of the above evokes---if the
| question is "what might this prose be _for_, at its heart?" then
| the list of answers is endless. And so the answer to the question
| "which words are necessary?" is "any of them might be, depending
| on what you intend to convey and to whom."
|
| So yes, eliminate every superfluous word, fine. Also, apply only
| the necessary paint strokes to the canvas. This advice is not
| helpful for a beginner, it's only useful to someone who has
| artistry to convey and enough craft to bear critique.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's not terrible advice because beginners tend to overwrite.
| This is why you'll find fantasy novels where the first page is
| scene setting, usually with a twist of the picturesque which is
| supposed to awe the reader.
|
| But nothing much happens until paragraph 5, by which time no
| one cares, because they want a novel, not a tour guide. ("And
| on our left we have the Unicorn Park of Alkkl'Blah. Built by
| the Morgon Autarchy to commemorate their triumph in the Zoonac
| Wars of the third century, its thousand foot crystal spires are
| legendary for...")
|
| You can do a lot with a single telling detail. Instead of
| describing everything, describe one thing that sums up
| everything else. Leave the rest to the reader's imagination.
| watwut wrote:
| I think that "no one cares" is simply not truth. These books
| do have their readers who do love them. And that style of
| writing is not even niche, it is not rare to like such books.
| Avshalom wrote:
| With fantasy novels specifically, yes people do want a tour
| guide. The Way Of Kings being 5x as long with 0.5x the plot
| movement of Mistborn didn't happen because brandon sanderson
| forgot how to write. It happens because Epic Fantasy as a
| genre is, in part, about being lead through a world.
| yokaze wrote:
| > It happens because Epic Fantasy as a genre is, in part,
| about being lead through a world.
|
| I don't see there a disagreement, it is "just" a question
| on how one is lead through the world:
|
| - Are you lead by the experiences by the characters of the
| book, and you simply feel the depth of the world behind it,
| and you learn to understand it over time.
|
| - Or do you have the narrator simply explain everything to
| you.
|
| - Or does some protagonist takes over that role.
|
| That seems a bit lazy to me, and not so appealing. Still,
| it can made for a good read, mind you. I definitely
| swallowed some of those books.
| bitexploder wrote:
| Yes. You sign up knowing you will have a paragraph upon
| paragraph about a characters clothing. Epic fantasy is
| meant to be fully realized and asks much more of its
| reader. The four best modern epic fantasy: Wheel of Time,
| Malazan Book of the Fallen, Song of Fire and Ice, and Way
| of Kings. I think GRRM has the best balance of pacing, but
| you don't just sit down and casually read these stories in
| a weekend. Well, you can, and some people like to do a fast
| read and then a slow read to full absorb it. Ultimately, I
| quite enjoy it. The slow pace is nice. It can be an
| exercise in patience, but they are quite rewarding to me.
| There are plenty of books out there that go faster and have
| tighter, cleaner writing.
| billfruit wrote:
| Somehow there is a world of difference in when one moves from
| Henry James to Hemingway.
|
| It is as if James violates every maxim of how to write simply
| and clearly and succinctly, but ultimately his writing has
| aura of ambiguity which enriches it rather than diminishes
| it. He will go paragraphs and pages even, one has to mentally
| unwind a lot of it, like an intricate puzzle, to grasp the
| tiniest specks, bits of knowledge about the story, about the
| plot. And the thing is he doesn't do much description, all
| the details are abstracted but the seeming convoluted manner,
| and subtle hints deducted from indirection, it does create a
| captivating experience.
| mhb wrote:
| _...no one cares, because they want a novel, not a tour
| guide_
|
| That criticism is pretty applicable to _The Sun Also Rises_.
| Two great sentences and a lot of setting description.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| I politely disagree. There is very little useless detail in
| that book. Every place detail opens up the characters who
| live there, in how they bother to notice or not notice it.
| It also creates the contrasts between Paris, Pamplona and
| the intermediate settings.
| mhb wrote:
| Thanks. I am open to the explanation that I did not
| appreciate it.
| pmichaud wrote:
| (Just to be clear, I don't think it's "terrible advice," just
| not the most relevant for beginners.)
|
| I definitely recognize what you're talking about, but my
| sense is that there are two core problems of poor writing,
| neither of which is helped at all by this advice:
|
| 1. Having something to say at all. This is the art of it, not
| the craft. If you have something resonant to communicate and
| you do it with living words, audiences suddenly become quite
| forgiving of sloppy craftsmanship. I won't dunk on any books
| in particular, but we can all think of books that are both
| wildly popular and objectively terrible.
|
| I think the right advice to overcome this issue is "live a
| life. Keep your eyes open. Like really go for it, man." Maybe
| after the first, breathless draft is complete then say to
| this author: good, now try cutting half the words but keeping
| everything you intended.
|
| 2. Bad craftsmanship. Poorly constructed scenes, paragraphs,
| sentences.
|
| I think the right advice here is "write. write. write. read.
| write more." The aphorism goes something like "everyone has a
| million terrible words inside them, and they must write them
| all out before any of the good ones emerge."
|
| Claim: in the normal course of events, if an intelligent and
| earnest person is an avid writer and reader and student of
| the world, their million words will become progressively
| better until they are finally good. I believe my quantity
| over quality focus for students is borne out by the research
| across domains.
|
| "Nobody likes exposition dumps or purple prose, brutally cut
| everything" not only isn't central to the goal of generating
| a bunch of words, but it may actually discourage people from
| producing the volume of work I think they'll need to become
| good. I say write purple, write a 200,000 word infodump. No
| one likes infodumps until some genius comes along with the
| first pure infodump novel that sells 5mm copies while
| everyone else complains, and then that's the publishing game
| for the next 10 years.
|
| Just whatever you do, write.
| Animats wrote:
| - Having something to say at all.
|
| Yes. Most bloggers. A full screen of infodump about
| themselves and what they were doing, then, perhaps, just
| perhaps, some content. Too often, just enough content to
| maximize clicks.
|
| - Bad craftsmanship.
|
| That's a teachable skill. Merely writing many words is not
| enough. Someone must criticize them. Back when journalism
| had copy editors, many writers learned their trade as
| newspaper reporters.
|
| - Just whatever you do, write.
|
| And if no one is reading it, please stop.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _And if no one is reading it, please stop._
|
| This is not advice I would personally give, because: (1)
| Not-writing mostly guarantees that one is not going to
| get better at it. (2) Current audience size isn't a
| reliable indicator of whether one "should" (if we're
| judging) be doing a thing, whether that thing is writing,
| podcasting, creating open source projects, etc.
|
| Everyone has to get through "the gap" between one's taste
| and one's skills somehow. https://vimeo.com/85040589
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| I agree with the other replies that it doesn't make sense
| to ask bloggers to stop writing if they don't have many
| readers, not even if their writing is truly poor. Many
| bloggers aren't aiming to be the next Joel Spolsky or
| Raymond Chen, they're content with relatively few
| readers, and that's a good thing. If nothing else,
| writing is good exercise for future writing.
|
| If the 'blogosphere' is functioning well, it shouldn't
| much matter if inexperienced bloggers are churning out
| poor quality posts, as the best ones should still rise to
| prominence just the same. The average quality of all blog
| posts doesn't much matter. The existence of high quality
| blog posts is what matters.
|
| On a somewhat different note, I'd ask bloggers not to
| misrepresent their skill level. It might be good exercise
| for a student to write about a topic they're learning
| about, but it's frustrating to read a post written in an
| authoritative tone which turns out to be full of rookie
| misunderstandings.
| pmichaud wrote:
| No, sorry. I'm not trying to pitch a unified theory of
| writing pedagogy that precludes clickbait blogging.
|
| I'm trying to say that I think the actually most
| effective advice, on average, for an "intelligent and
| earnest person [who] is an avid writer and reader and
| student of the world" is to write and don't stop. All the
| caveats you might be tempted to add are already covered
| in the people I'm talking to, they happen naturally. On
| average.
| joemaller1 wrote:
| Streaming on PBS, Monday April 5. I have no idea how to watch PBS
| on a TV anymore.
| msla wrote:
| You need one of them special big display panels with an ATSC
| tuner built in.
|
| More seriously, in my experience (which includes some pretty
| boony boonies) the PBS stations are fairly easy to pick up with
| rabbit ears and a single scan.
|
| It's all the repeaters does the trick, I'm sure.
| Geezus_42 wrote:
| You can still pick it up with an antenna but they also have an
| app.
| wantoncl wrote:
| Sale: Baby shoes, unworn.
| bassrattle wrote:
| In George Orwell's 1984, Newspeak was a language formed by
| eliminating all of the words deemed unnecessary. The idea was,
| limit words and you may limit thoughts. While brevity can make a
| sentence more powerful, getting in the habit of eliminating words
| might be dangerous.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Using fewer words in a sentence is accomplished by having more
| words in your vocabulary.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I think the meaning is different enough that it's not the same
| thing. Editors and writers talk about excising unnecessary
| words from specific sentences where they aren't helping the
| reader understand your meaning. But, they're not saying that
| you should remove those words from your vocabulary and never
| use them, which is what Newspeak was about.
| paweladamczuk wrote:
| The article reads like an exercise in the opposite
| V-2 wrote:
| This was my impression as well. Well, being a non-native
| speaker I tend to blame myself. Still, this style of writing
| does sound self-indulgent to me:
|
| _" Hemingway's voice distilled itself with miraculous speed, a
| fusion of telegrammatic urgency and high modernist
| impersonality, with counterpoint learned from Bach and rhythms
| located profoundly in his own neurology"_
|
| etc.
| throwanem wrote:
| Good _God._ I write Lovecraft pastiche for fun and even I
| think that 's way too purple.
| criddell wrote:
| The next sentence is _" In the most beautiful way, it was
| anti-writing"_. That's somewhat revealing.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Yeah, I have no idea what the writer is saying. The only part
| of that I "get" is telegrammatic speed. What the hell is
| "high modernist impersonality"?
|
| I'm a native speaker and have read 3 Hemingway books.
| sjburt wrote:
| I assume they mean modernism, the prevailing artistic style
| of the first half of the 20th century.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| I thought that was post-modernism?
| Jiocus wrote:
| I have a mnemonic short story in my head that places
| modernists and post-modernists roughly in first and
| second half.
|
| > Post-modernism reacted to the modernists high ideals
| and empty promises. After all, it was their era (the
| modernists) that sparked the Great War which introduced
| the world to the new era industrialized warfare. Not
| once, but twice. Post-modernists arrived into this new
| Cold world that was left.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Awesome. Thank you for sharing that.
| throwaway823882 wrote:
| > Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they
| raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees
| too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the
| troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves,
| stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and
| afterwards the road bare and white except for the leaves.
|
| _" "I read that paragraph and I want to cry," confesses a
| literary scholar in Hemingway."_
|
| _What?_ That paragraph was horrible. First of all, after reading
| it two times, I still have no idea what the point was, other
| than: leaves, dust, troops. Second, he says the same thing _three
| times_.
|
| _" Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they
| raised powdered the trees."_ Ok.
|
| _" The trunks of the trees too were dusty"_ No shit. There's
| dust raised in the air high enough to get to the leaves. It's
| probably gonna be on the trunk.
|
| _" and the leaves fell early that year"_ Wait. Did they already
| fall? Or are they falling now? Or is this an omniscient narrator
| saying they will in the future?
|
| _" and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust
| rising"_ Yes, you told us in the last sentence.
|
| _" and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling"_ Oh, ok, so the
| leaves are falling _now_.
|
| _" and the soldiers marching"_ Yes, you told us in the last
| sentence, _and previously in the current sentence_.
| kleton wrote:
| Waste no word
|
| There, removed an extra word
| ilamont wrote:
| Stephen King railed _dogmatically_ against the use of adverbs. I
| liked his work but wasn 't aware of this ... obsession of his
| until I read _On Writing_. It made me more self-conscious about
| using adverbs in my own writing until I noticed that many great
| writers I love and respect had no such issue with incorporating
| adverbs.
|
| As my grandfather used to say, _chacun a son gout_ - to each his
| own.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Few people understand why they should eliminate those words. In
| fiction, the writer should be invisible unless they are a
| narrator. If you are a narrator, do it well, but if you are
| writing in the third person or omniscient view, don't "break the
| fourth wall" with editorial words that beg the question of whose
| judgment the word expresses. Hence the advice to strip out
| adverbs and re-write sentences that use words with the "-ly"
| suffix. Each one is a passive, begged question. If there is no
| person and character with intent associated with the adverb,
| strip it.
|
| The advice to eliminate superfluous words is not a recipe, it's a
| joke that is a variation on, if you want to be a good writer,
| only write the good stuff, or don't publish the bad stuff.
| Worshipping great writers won't make you a better writer any more
| than doing a cargo dance will get supplies dropped from the sky.
| If you want to write, have a story to tell, the rest is editing.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| " In fiction, the writer should be invisible unless they are a
| narrator."
|
| I don't actually think this is reasonable or possible. Readers
| are fully aware that writers are distinct from other writers in
| their prose structure. This is colloquially known as "style".
| Additionally, other writers can most certainly identify
| individual writers by their narrative choices based on the same
| notion of "style". Hemingway had a style and that's why so many
| people compare their prose to him!
| motohagiography wrote:
| Crappy writing isn't a style unless it's on purpose, and
| often not even then. A great example of this is Philip K.
| Dick, who was a terrible writer by any standard, and not on
| purpose either, but he still became a great author because
| the overall effects of his ideas were so good that readers
| tolerated his crappy writing. The total effect of his ideas
| were his unique style, not his clunky dialogue or characters
| with less animation than action figures. He was like the Sex
| Pistols of science fiction in that he could barely play his
| instrument, but made the equivalent to some pop hits and he
| inspired a lot of other much better people to get over their
| own fears and write.
|
| Authors certainly have a voice, but it's because the whole
| story is told in it, and not because they interject to
| comment and give the reader direction using extra
| descriptions from a perspective that is outside the story. It
| would be like a director addressing the audience or an
| "applause" sign. When I read fiction, I read it to appreciate
| the effect of the author's craft, and not to listen to
| someone sounding things out and practising. Adverbs aren't
| forbidden, but I see them as cribs for re-editing because
| they are usually placeholders for unformed ideas.
| NoOneNew wrote:
| The writer being invisible is an academic perspective that
| never holds water in the real world. Every single reader and
| reviewer talks about how good or bad a writer's voice is. The
| concept of invisibility makes beginning writers go from one
| extreme to another. From too much poetic prose to being sterile
| and monotone. This also applies in nonfiction writing.
|
| And no, adverbs do not make sentences passive. This idea popped
| up in amateur writing forums recently and its driving me nuts.
| Passive tense involves using is, has, was as verbs in a
| sentence. No where in any official definition of passive tense
| does anyone claim adverbs create passive tense.
|
| And the joke is, writing is about life, minus the boring parts.
| zwischenzug wrote:
| Eliminate superfluous words
| graderjs wrote:
| Cut spare words
| kibwen wrote:
| Be laconic.
| throwaway823882 wrote:
| Summarize.
| llarsson wrote:
| That was my thought, too, but the "every" makes it a stronger
| mandate than what both of us came up with. Without the "every",
| you could let some questionably superfluous words stay.
| CharlesW wrote:
| "Every" is superfluous. If there's even one superfluous word,
| you haven't eliminated superfluous words.
| [deleted]
| zeckalpha wrote:
| Then you've not eliminated
| dwaltrip wrote:
| You have, just not all.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| Seconding this. The "every" is necessary.
| Avshalom wrote:
| Well if we want a strong mandate we can go with
|
| Eliminate!
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _Eliminate!_
|
| Which -- without context -- could be misinterpreted, say as
| a certain biological function.
|
| The goal is not bragging rights for brevity, a la code
| golf: The goal is to serve the reader, and sometimes a few
| extra words, well-chosen and -placed, can help.
|
| (A few extra words can also serve as cheap insurance
| against ambiguity, which can be critical in contract
| drafting.)
| Avshalom wrote:
| Sure but taking advantage of context is how most brevity
| works.
|
| For instance which words are superfluous is context
| dependent. Also "eliminate every superfluous word" is
| good advice primarily in context of the question "how do
| I improve my writing", it's terrible advice for "how do I
| stop pooping so much".
| maest wrote:
| As Shakespeare once said "keeping things short is what makes
| things wise".
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| "poetry is compression" - William Goldman
|
| easily the most profound three words I had ever encountered
| as an aspirational teenage writer, though it would be several
| decades before my understanding of "compression" developed
| sufficiently to fully recognize and appreciate the depth of
| that insight.
|
| One wonders what Goldman would have thought of Claude
| Shannon.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| The title reminds one of Orwell's essay on the English language.
| Other than his essay about having to shoot an elephant, it's my
| favorite. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-
| foundation/orwel...
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