[HN Gopher] A writing tip I learned at Oxford
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A writing tip I learned at Oxford
Author : mooreds
Score : 83 points
Date : 2021-05-29 12:57 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (newsletter.timber.fm)
(TXT) w3m dump (newsletter.timber.fm)
| tonetheman wrote:
| A much better lesson:
| https://stevenpressfield.com/2009/10/writing-wednesdays-2-th...
|
| TL;DR no one wants to read your sh*t
| andai wrote:
| >Here it is. Here's the #1 lesson you learn working in
| advertising (and this has stuck with me, to my advantage, my
| whole working life):
|
| Nobody wants to read your shit.
|
| Let me repeat that. Nobody-not even your dog or your mother-has
| the slightest interest in your commercial for Rice Krispies or
| Delco batteries or Preparation H. Nor does anybody care about
| your one-act play, your Facebook page or your new sesame
| chicken joint at Canal and Tchopotoulis.
|
| It isn't that people are mean or cruel. They're just busy.
|
| Nobody wants to read your shit.
|
| <
| blowski wrote:
| People obviously want to read other people's shit, or we
| wouldn't have books, newspapers, RSS readers, search engines,
| etc.
|
| But people don't want to just read it because it's there. They
| want to read it because they think they'll get something out of
| it. If they think it will take too much effort, _then_ they
| won't want to read it.
|
| Keep writing. Don't just be a consumer of other people's
| writing. Don't say "I'll never be Stephen King so what's the
| point". Keep writing. Even if people aren't interested today,
| one day they will be.
| cassepipe wrote:
| Worth recommanding too from Howard S Becker :
| https://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/craft_articles/b...
| foxbarrington wrote:
| The tip: read your writing out loud.
| bennysomething wrote:
| Yep, thanks, tried scanning it to find the but of advice.
| Failed:)
| stared wrote:
| It might be useful for writing essays.
|
| It is essential for writing YouTube comments -
| https://xkcd.com/481/.
| teekert wrote:
| Hero!
| dghughes wrote:
| I was taught that writing and speaking are very different you
| tend to speak much differently than you'd write. Maybe that was
| bad advice.
| [deleted]
| pfortuny wrote:
| Indeed: it seems (according to TA Eliot) that Henry James
| dictated his latest novels to a typist (or something similar)
| and that accounts for the density and lack of freshness (also
| of his revises edition of his works, which he did in his old
| age).
| Wistar wrote:
| Mark Twain dictated some 2,000 pages for his autobiography.
|
| "Twain first tried dictating into Thomas Edison's new
| recording machine but didn't like it -- he was a man who
| strutted stages all over the world, delivering
| extemporaneous spiels. Twain needed a live audience to
| speak to, not a bloodless machine. He eventually found that
| audience in stenographer Josephine Hobby and author Albert
| Bigelow Paine, his first biographer. Paine says Twain often
| dictated from his bed, clad in a handsome silk dressing
| gown of rich Persian pattern, propped against great snowy
| pillows. He also got up, paced the floor and waved his arms
| as he poured out nearly 2,000 pages of typescript over
| three years."
|
| https://www.npr.org/2010/12/01/131703237/on-publishing-
| mark-...
| nojs wrote:
| PG has some interesting thoughts about this:
| http://www.paulgraham.com/talk.html
| grayclhn wrote:
| You do, but the goal here isn't to write the way you speak,
| it's to force a different engagement with your own writing
| than you would get otherwise. This page from the UNC writing
| center gives a better explanation:
| https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/reading-aloud/
|
| I try to follow this advice for important emails, and it
| helps a lot.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| If you write on a computer, printing the essay in a different
| font/color/line spacing, and reading it, also works.
| cf wrote:
| I'd say writing that's like your speech without filler words
| and backtracking to rephrase what you just said can make for
| remarkably great prose.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| But did you learn it at Oxford? Are you an ex-FAANG tech lead
| that learned a SECRET that RICH PEOPLE DONT WANT YOU TO KNOW!?
| Are you posting this from a rented mansion next to a rented
| super car? Are you making millions while sleeping at home and
| we could too, if we just use this one trick?
|
| In other words - thanks for saving a click as others said.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| Thanks. It felt like I was trying to find how long to cook
| something and at what temperature and instead the author is
| only interested in telling me about their grandmother's
| sweaters and childhood summers in Vermont.
| hh3k0 wrote:
| You nailed it. That's precisely how I felt.
| amerine wrote:
| Thank you.
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| I can corroborate; I've been writing long-form for years, and
| somewhere along the way I began releasing my works as podcast
| episodes. There have been many occasions where I didn't
| recognize problems until I was recording the narration.
| NaOH wrote:
| I've also closed my eyes and used a computer's text-to-speech
| capability. I find this helpful when my writing is fresh and
| I'm apt to be reading as much from memory as with my eyes.
| jordanmorgan10 wrote:
| I read this comment outloud
| OttPeterR wrote:
| Saved me a click
| gojomo wrote:
| I half expected it to be, "Add credibility signifiers like 'I
| learned this at Oxford' to your headlines."
| late2part wrote:
| Another tip I learned early on: "Don't bury the lede."
| LegitShady wrote:
| Another writing tip, which is the antithesis of today's recipe
| blogging culture to which this post belongs.
|
| - If I can't find the most important part of your writing in 3
| seconds, I've already moved on.
|
| Take the linked article - I clicked on it for a writing tip. In
| the first paragraph they suddenly tell me it's not about a
| writing tip, it's 'weaving together three things'.
|
| Now I scan the article quickly looking for the writing tip,
| because I don't care about the history of the writing tip before
| I've evaluated if it's any good.
|
| 3 seconds are up, and my patience is gone, and while the author
| is very interested in their history of writing tutorials at
| oxford, literally nobody else is.
|
| I'll only care about it if I think the writing tip is
| interesting, but I can't find the writing tip because it's
| organized like a recipe blog - you click for a recipe, and they
| hide the recipe somewhere on the page. At least with recipes you
| can recognize the format of the recipe down the page somewhere,
| making scanning easier. With this I can't even do that.
|
| So here's the writing tip for the author - don't hook someone in
| promising a writing tip, and then hide that writing tip. If it's
| enough of a tip to get me interested in your story, I'll read it.
| If it's not, then you just clickbaited me and nothing you write
| matters.
|
| I classify this as some sort of weird ultra snobbery ('I learned
| this at oxford') clickbait ('here's a writing tip I'm going to
| hide in a diary entry'). Promise me a writing tip, give me the
| writing tip, or lose my interest forever (because now I classify
| you as recipe blog I won't click on it again).
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| that was a pretty long comment, with a lot of points to follow.
| LegitShady wrote:
| but you can find the main point in 3 seconds - it's in the
| second line, on it's own, with a symbol beside it. Then I get
| into the story. You can choose to follow along or not
| afterward - you've gotten the most important point right
| away.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Ok, that symbol though - the > is generally used as a quote
| symbol in HN, so of course I was confused as to what was
| being quoted.
|
| on edit: by quote symbol I mean this is the point that
| someone else in the parent comment or the article made that
| I am going to respond to in my following bit of text.
| LegitShady wrote:
| I think it's actually a carry over from reddit, where it
| activates the quote, while here on hacker news it does
| nothing. It's just a symbol.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| It's a carryover from long established internet
| (plaintext email, Usenet, etc.) convention, which is
| where reddit (and lots of other forums) got it, too.
| LegitShady wrote:
| most people on the internet have never used plain text
| email, or usenet. A fair chunk of them have used reddit,
| where it actually does something.
|
| So I guess it's just not that important to me, overall,
| to use a convention that few people have ever used. If HN
| had a basic quote function it wouldn't matter.
| [deleted]
| havelhovel wrote:
| > So I guess it's just not that important to me, overall,
| to use a convention that few people have ever used.
|
| My favorite writing tip is knowing one's audience. (:
| LegitShady wrote:
| My audience is not curmudgeons who require I use their
| quote convention that doesn't actually do anything,
| because they're unlikely to learn anything from anyone
| anyways, since they're nitpicking symbology.
| jlokier wrote:
| Intriguing. I have never used Reddit except as a search
| result.
|
| The ">" is ubiquitous in email, usenet, Markdown, Github
| and Discord, which are more familiar. It seems to be a
| widely used convention here on HN as well, even though HN
| software doesn't highlight it.
|
| It's baked into a lot of modern software due to long-
| standing convention for about half a century.
|
| Nowadays that software includes anything taking input
| with a vague similarity to Markdown. There's a lot of
| that about.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > So I guess it's just not that important to me, overall,
| to use a convention that few people have ever used.
|
| Lots of people have used it, because lots of places have
| copied it from where it originated.
|
| At any rate, HN is mostly-plain-text environment that is
| more similar than most newer places that have adopted the
| convention to the context in which it originates, so in
| addition to its relevance to past experience, it makes
| sense on its own here.
|
| > So I guess it's just not that important to me, overall,
| to use a convention that few people have ever used.
|
| Yeah, lots of HN conventions each wouldn't matter if HN
| had one specific relevant formatting feature for the use
| case the convention addresses, but it doesn't, so we have
| the conventions we have.
| dcminter wrote:
| "imminently listenable" - I think my writing advice would be:
| don't give writing advice about proof reading if you're prone to
| typos!
|
| Author presumably meant "emminently listenable" (a bit of a
| cliche but not heinous).
| etrevino wrote:
| Surely he mean _eminently_ listenable.
| dcminter wrote:
| Hah, indeed. Hoist by my own.
| function_seven wrote:
| Muphry's Law strikes again!
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| randcraw wrote:
| I buy the OP's advice when the writer hopes to engage their
| audience in a light conversational medium like a podcast. But is
| talk the only style of communication to aspire to?
|
| Yes, much great writing is musical. But surely no composer of
| stout heart sets the stage using only one musical style, nor ask
| the same voice to sing every aria. Nor are all great works vocal.
|
| Does it not make more sense for authors to explore the telling of
| tales through many voices in many rooms, and not just one?
| m1117 wrote:
| Writing tip: add "TLDR;".
| V-2 wrote:
| A writing tip I learned at community college: "get to the point".
| xchip wrote:
| TL;DR read aloud what you wrote because it is easier to catch
| mistakes
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| This leaves out the sample from Steven King that illustrates
| adding words for rhythm and not meaning.
| CrazyPyroLinux wrote:
| Pay attention to spelling, grammar and Oxford commas.
| maga wrote:
| I see what you did there and I disapprove. But seriously, I
| find Oxford commas so useful that I catch myself trying to use
| them in three other languages that don't have them.
| HDMI_Cable wrote:
| May I ask which languages don't have them? I can't think of
| any European or Indian language that doesn't use them (when
| writing with the Latin script). I may be wrong though.
| stared wrote:
| EDIT:
|
| Pay attention to speling, a grammar and Oxford commas.
| Jiocus wrote:
| > I ended up studying English Romantic poetry with the late
| Jonathan Wordsworth, who was a great-great-great nephew of the
| famous poet William Wordsworth.
|
| Sounds like they were _Worth their Words_.
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