[HN Gopher] Editing Means Writing Less
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Editing Means Writing Less
Author : _bramses
Score : 21 points
Date : 2022-06-21 01:38 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bramadams.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bramadams.dev)
| phailhaus wrote:
| Ironically, this does not respect the reader's time. Takes 12
| clicks to read through all the points, and I still don't know
| what the colors mean, why the nodes are connected the way they
| are, or what it's trying to convey. The default layout also makes
| the graph look more complex than it really is; there's no reason
| for edges to overlap.
| jkingsbery wrote:
| * "Respect the time of your readers, and respect your message!"
|
| * "The Art of Writing Less and Saying Basically The Same Thing
| [sic - that's not even a complete sentence]"
|
| * "Don't say anything more than you need to / Revision 1: Don't
| say more than needed / Revision 2: Say only what's needed"
|
| * "If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter"
|
| * "Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no
| unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for
| the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines
| and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the
| writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat
| subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."
|
| * "When revising, pretend to be your own worst enemy. Is there
| anything that can be misunderstood? If so, change it so that it
| can't!"
|
| I'm confused about whether the author _read this advice_ and
| chose to ignore it by repeating it 6 (or, 5 times, and alluded
| to it with a sentence fragment), or whether this is some self-
| aware-meta-I-know-the-rules-but-I 'm-ignoring them, or what's
| going on here.
| [deleted]
| egypturnash wrote:
| I was coming here to post similar sentiments. :)
| _bramses wrote:
| I think graphs are fun, so I made a graph -\\_(tsu)_/-
| l33t2328 wrote:
| It's unclear to me what is the benefit of presenting the
| information like this.
| michaericalribo wrote:
| Disagreed. These are the end goals, but the very first step is to
| write as many words as possible. Editing is cutting what's there
| to something that actually works -- cleaning up.
| jtaft wrote:
| Meh, I do a lot of technical writing. Documents are very dry to
| read.
|
| For non technical writing, I really enjoy additional words that
| invoke emotions.
| bccdee wrote:
| Editing means writing _more_ --it just means publishing less.
| Instead of writing 1000 words, you write 1500 and delete 1000 of
| them.
| ghaff wrote:
| I agree to an extent--mostly upfront "throat clearing" and
| sometimes there's a section that just doesn't fit or becomes
| tangential as a piece develops. But for day to day writing,
| which I do a lot of, the 1200 words or so I put down is mostly
| going to get little nips and tucks rather than a lot of
| wholesale cuts. YMMV of course.
| bccdee wrote:
| Yeah I'm exaggerating a bit to prove a point, but even so,
| each nip and tuck is an new sentence fragment written and an
| old sentence fragment discarded. The more you edit, the
| smaller the ratio of what you publish to what you wrote.
| ghaff wrote:
| Fair enough. But I do this sort of thing all the time and--
| assuming I have a clear topic in mind and the supporting
| material (big caveats which can take quite a bit of
| time)--banging out a thousand word article is certainly
| less than a day process. And, yes, while a fair number of
| words change or change positions or get reworded, that sort
| of essentially copy-editing is mostly stuff I can do in my
| sleep.
| hawski wrote:
| I don't get it.
| nescioquid wrote:
| I feel I was "pranked" by my "reading French for grad students"
| instructor. Assigned was a discursively long letter by Pascal
| to translate. The initial excitement of getting to read some
| Pascal wore thin as the letter went on and on and on. All was
| forgiven when I got to the end and read for myself the source
| of the famous "Sorry this letter was so long; I didn't have
| time to write a shorter one" (or something to that effect --
| it's one of the nodes in the graph).
|
| That was a great lesson on several levels.
|
| Pascal's letter was an info dump, not a concise expression of
| an idea he wanted to convey. In editing, you start with the
| info dump and remove the unnecessary until you have clear
| simple statement of the ideas. All of this takes work, and
| mainly culls the unessential from the info dump.
|
| Maybe the point of the page, is that the ideas have been
| culled, distilled into a simple little graph, resulting in
| _even less_ writing?
| Konohamaru wrote:
| > Assigned was a discursively long letter by Pascal to
| translate. The initial excitement of getting to read some
| Pascal wore thin as the letter went on and on and on.
|
| You should write a letter to Niklaus Wirth complaining to him
| for making such a long programming language.
| nescioquid wrote:
| Lol. Haven't worked with Pascal, but writing James Gosling
| crossed my mind once or twice ;-)
| hyperpape wrote:
| It's a half truth that editing makes your writing more concise.
| First drafts have sloppy sentences that need to be trimmed or
| removed entirely. But proper editing also reveals where you've
| assumed too much or your argument is weak, and fixing those
| problems requires more words, not fewer. When I see a writer
| whose prose is too fluid, my instinct is to ask what's left out.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah. For something that has to be just right in a limited
| number of words (ad copy, the introduction to a product or the
| company on your website, etc. you'll write a whole lot and
| throw out a lot. (And fiction is presumably a whole different
| ball game.)
|
| But your typical article or blog post? Much less technical
| docs? As you say, you'll clean up a lot of sloppy sentences (at
| least I do), maybe decide something is too much of a diversion,
| maybe decide your long winded lead-in really needs to get to
| the point, and probably add text to clarify some things or
| bulletproof them. (When I wrote research notes I loved
| footnotes for this purpose.)
|
| By and large, I'm _not_ doing a big word dump and then cutting
| half of it.
| dont__panic wrote:
| Why is this idea presented with... physics-governed vertices on a
| graph?
|
| There's a certain irony to a blog post about concise writing that
| uses this much JS and CSS to display a few quotes.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Those snippets could be less than half a page of simple text,
| instead it's a confusing graph requiring JS just to tell me
| ironic things like:
|
| > Is there anything that can be misunderstood? If so, change it
| so that it can't!
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(page generated 2022-06-21 23:02 UTC)