My own pet peeve in non-fiction, particularly the kind that appears on blogs: the excruciating warmup before the author finally gets to the point of the post.
I know why this happens. When you sit down to write, you don't know what exactly you're going to say. You may even be anxious about it. Then, an idea sparks your imagination and you start writing stuff. The warmup that comes out initially gets you on track. Nothing wrong with that.
The harm is keeping that crap in the post. Delete it! If I don't understand what I'm about to read in the first paragraph, I'm probably done.
Something else I don't like: writers who use too many words. The telltale sign of a first draft is the vast quantity of words (and even entire sentences) that don't need to be there.
A single edit with the goal of ruthlessly eliminating every unnecessary word works wonders for any first draft.
Edit: On the topic of fiction, the author gives a beautiful example from the Wizard of Oz:
> When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothin but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else. [continues]
I haven't read the book but this passage alone makes me want to.
This can be a highly effective form of writing when done well.
A strong setup can certainly pull readers in. The problem is often most inexperienced writers use such a setup to clear away their "mind fog" and get to the point. And once the words are on the page it's hard to remove them (nobody wants wasted effort).
My guidance to new writers is always this: start with two bulleted items. First is a question or priming sentence. Second is the conclusion the reader will takeaway after reading what you've written.
Once you have those two bullet points you make them part of your first paragraph AND use them to structure the entirety of the piece (just add more bullet items between the first and second points).
Just to add onto this, I often write the sort of lead in paragraphs the GP describes last or nearly last. So it’s absolutely not the case that I used them as a way to clear my mind—the primary point was already there, I just wanted to introduce it a different way.
It may be a highly effective form of writing for story telling.
It is extremely annoying for technical blog posts. It's kind of a youtubezation of the writing.
It is even worse in internet recipes. The authors tend to go on and on about their feelings, family and personal stories before finally getting to the point how to actually cook the dish. I usually have to skip several paragraphs.
My trick is to ctrl-f for 'tbsp' whenever I hit a recipe blog site. In their prose it is always referred to as 'tablespoons'(if at all), and the first reference to tbsp is usually in the ingredients list at the actual recipe.
I think that 'fluff' is actually interesting content to the bulk of people landing on that page. I know folks who read recipes for fun, I expect they genuinely enjoy reading the color commentary just like I might enjoy reading some 'extraneous' content in a movie/album review
I follow a lot of cooking subreddits. I think it was charming in the earlier days of food blogging, but today it seems every recipe reader is beyond tired of it.
Part of the problem is that almost every food blogger is emulating the exact same character. It's the same harried but still whipping something creative together, educated but conspicuously mentions liking a glass of wine, love-my-kids-but-man-do-they-get-on-my-nerves persona. It's the 2010's white sitcom parent writ large.
I'd read a lot more of the prose on these blogs if they didn't all sound the same.
depends a lot on the commentary, though - i probably don't care about your feelings (sorry) or descriptive prose. on the other hand, when i'm looking up a recipe from another culture, i really value commentary on the background or history of the dish.
I'm not sure how a section of information that is often largely irrelevant to the recipe (despite mentioning a few key terms) is going to be a valuable SEO practise.
I assume people are trying to be the next online cooking personality who gets to publish a book. I've seen a couple in shops with pictures of YouTube recipe demonstration people on the cover.
Also, more text is more "content" to mix adverts into.
> I assume people are trying to be the next online cooking personality who gets to publish a book.
I just assume that they associate recipes and foods with times and places and people (generally happily) and it's akin to "do you remember that time mother cooked weasel?" kind of conversations you'd have with people, except on a blog.
That it probably the case for those that are put together more as a blog for friends and family to peruse.
But a lot of the sites I've seen don't feel that way. They feel like they are desperately trying to feel that way though (the old "sincerity is key: once you can fake it you win" skit).
Something I read a couple of weeks ago discussed this. From what I remember it’s to increase the time a user spends on a page, this increases the page ranking in Google; ISTR it was called dwell time.
Acronym expanded for the benefit of anyone else who's browsing HN before coffee and would have taken a similarly embarrassing length of time to infer the likely meaning of this one, which I'd never seen before.
I've always known is as "I Seem To Remember" and I thought it was in common use. It's been around for as long as I can remember, apologies for assuming.
That was the first thing that came to mind for me too. Usually the recipes come after two pages of exposition and 5 ads. It gets especially bad on my phone because then all I see are ads.
That's why I love King Arthur Flour's recipes (among others). Short intro, and then it gets right into how to get more consistency and quality out of the recipe or how to do variations on the recipe. It's not another long winded essay that boils down to "I cook this for my family."
When I was an industry analyst, my boss called it "throat clearing." Sometimes I do construct something that IMO serves as a nice intro even if some people here would prefer it to be "Just the facts, maam." But, yeah, I not infrequently just end up deleting a few paragraphs.
> This phrasing makes it clear that the goal of that edit is to eliminate every unnecessary words.
By your own interpretation, we can get rid of "ruthlessly", no?
> This phrasing implies that just one edit is needed
I don't think it does, even when disconnected from the rest of the sentence. It's fairly clear to me that it's talking about an edit where you "eliminat[e] unnecessary words" which may or may not be part of a greater editing process.
It's like there are two tiers of writing at The Atlantic/New Yorker: A nice well written piece on a major topic that leaves you with something to think about during the day, or 8+ paragraphs on something like the emotional impact of a specific spring time NYC odor, or the perils of hiring a dog walker in Brooklyn.
> I also find the use of statistics/citing numbers from studies to prove a point, a most boring way to argue a point in writing.
This definitely depends on the point being argued, and the rigour expected by the audience. For any vaguely technical subject, it's quite possible to cite statistics to great effect, though it may not always be necessary.
Actually, your comment made me think about how I respond to statistics in non-technical writing, say, in a news article or forum post. My gut reaction seems to be: "how is the author going to spin this fact, and what other evidence did they conveniently ignore because it contradicts their argument?"
> My own pet peeve in non-fiction, particularly the kind that appears on blogs: the excruciating warmup before the author finally gets to the point of the post.
Pet peeve of mine - If we could eliminate the "I appear to be talking about something happening today, but am actually talking about something that happened in 1840" article setup entirely, that would make me very happy. It was clever at first, but you can now usually see the setup coming a mile off.
On many of my favorite Youtube videos, that "excrutiating" warm-up is part of the appeal. It feels more like a mysterious build-up towards an exciting payoff, when done right. That can be generalized towards writing or any other media.
But even then, you probably should be very selective when you do it. If the point is to entertain, it may be OK. (The Avengers Endgame is just over three hours. I bet there's some buildup in that.)
But don't do it if the point is to communicate. I read somewhere that someone said (either about physics or CS): "There's 50 times as much going on as I can keep up with, and I only operate at 2% efficiency. So there's this factor of 2500 working against me, and every day I fall seven years further behind." In that kind of of environment, if I read your stuff, you'd better not waste my time.
Many writers rely more heavily on pronouns than I’d suggest is useful. For me this sort of thing comes under the heading Remember that Writing Is Not Speaking. When we talk, we can usually make ourselves understood even amid a flood of vague “he”s and “she”s. On the page, too many pronouns are apt to be confounding. I’d strongly suggest to the point of insistence that you avoid referring to two people by the same pronoun over the course of a single sentence; to be frank, I’d suggest that you avoid it over the course of a single paragraph. (I know a few authors of same-sex romance novels who are regularly driven to tears by this sort of thing.)
Tightened up:
Pronouns can be overused. Writing is not speaking. When we talk, we can understand who's who amid a flood of "he"s and "she"s. On the page, that's confusing. Best to avoid referring to two people by the same pronoun in the same sentence. (Same-sex romance novelists struggle with this.)
Who, besides the guy himself, says this guy is the "Internet's copy editor in chief"?
What you have gained in brevity, you have lost many times over in tone, pace and depth.
The author's repetitions are not errors - they highlight his insistence. Additionally, despite ample pronoun use, his text is clear and illustrative of his point.
Same. The edited version loses the author's voice - which is what good editing is not supposed to. And the aside about same-sex romance authors goes from a personal anecdote to a general statement. Personal anecdotes are more entertaining.
I don’t even prefer the first sentence: The “I’d suggest” is completely redundant. The rest of it is more difficult to read and parse than the GP’s version, while the pacing seems slow and the path through the content muddled. To each his own, I guess.
- Pronoun overuse bad. Write don't speak. When talking, many pronouns understandable. Not on paper. Avoid same pronoun for multiple people (same-sex romance especially difficult).
Or how about another:
- Pronouns bad. Write don't speak. Can speak many pronouns, not write. Same pronouns, multiple people? No. (Same-sex romance especially)
Making something shorter or "tighter" isn't necessarily better. Word count isn't everything.
Brevity may be the soul of wit, but that implies there's still wit left. There's lots of writing effects that can be lost through overediting, or following the "rules" too closely.
This is not intended to be a flame, but your example there, reads like a staccato-enamoured teenager mumbling into his bowl of fruit-loops in the morning, or alternatively, like you're reading back notes you copied off someone's powerpoint slide during a presentation.
Half of that is neither grammatically correct, nor complete sentences, and there is limited implicit or explicit relation or flow between your dot points.
I bought Benjamin Dreyer (the author)'s book on writing style, and the arrogant title of his book alone should have been a red flag. I'd strognly recommend On Writing Well instead.
An infrequent part of my job is writing and editing public reports about data. Not even guessing as to causal factors or future impacts, just stating the data in English.
I wish more people would accept that writing is not speaking. Beyond pronouns, when this is good advice:
- Don't use acronyms for short names or phrases. "Department of Motor Vehicles" is a mouthful, but not much more of an eyeful than "DMV" after seeing it twice. (Consider using the acronym if the amount of space filled with text looks daunting).
- It's okay to be repetitive. In fact, it's good to repetitively present data. The pinnacles of this is the table, but narrative text also works.
> Don't use acronyms for short names or phrases. "Department of Motor Vehicles" is a mouthful, but not much more of an eyeful than "DMV" after seeing it twice.
I find this much harder to scan than the acronym, especially when the acronym is common.
There should be a version of this for hacker news comments and tech blog posts. Every time I see the phrase 'that said' or 'that being said' I involuntarily cringe.
Can you explain why? The phase allows you, after having made a point, to invert that point then suggest an alternative explanation or perspective.
I read a few of the posts in the search results, and "That being said" felt natural in many cases to join sometimes contradictory positions or different degrees of the same position together into one fluid thought.
Someone can cringe at anyone. Without offering critique, insight, or alternative it feels hollow though.
I don't really have a good explanation other than we already have words like 'However' and 'But'. It also seems redundant, maybe just start typing your contradictory position without the need for a connecting phrase?
That being said, it may just be me who is annoyed by the phrase. I think it just gets used a lot and I can't help but notice for some reason. I think I've associated the phrase with strawman arguments and my hollow cringe is unfair judgement.
I don't mind phrases like 'that being said', aside from the general critique of cliche-repetition.
To me it carries connotations of the first clause having validity while the second apparently contrasting point also has validity. Its specific purpose is to allow a connection between points, without explicitly eliminating or contradicting any of the clauses.
Using 'however' or 'but' lacks this contextualisation, and that's without getting into the criticisms of their use is popular speech and writing (i.e. when someone says two clauses of the form 'A, but B.' what they usually mean is 'B').
> I don't really have a good explanation other than we already have words like 'However' and 'But'.
'But' is very generic and 'However' is longer than 'that said'.
> It also seems redundant, maybe just start typing your contradictory position without the need for a connecting phrase?
That makes it much more difficult to keep the topic flowing, and it can be very confusing if you jump to an almost-contradiction without warning the reader that it's time to do some contrasting and fine-tuning.
We're both nitpicking at this point: "however" is shorter than "that said" according to two out of three relevant metrics:
"however": 1 word, 3 syllables, 7 characters
"that said": 2 words, 2 syllables, 9 characters
That said, it's a waste of time to worry about the difference anyway. Keep in mind that we aren't minifying JS or hand-optimizing processor code. When it comes to natural-language communication between humans, not every byte matters.
Use the words that sound natural to you for your intended audience. Weigh feedback from trusted coworkers and members of that audience.
Could the overuse of "that said" also be a reason for not liking it? I find there are many words and phrases that tend to be overused, especially in marketing and Ted talks.
Not sure what the exact complaint is here, though using said or sounds to refer to something written can be considered a defect. Comes up often in speech, too. One would substitute "read" or "reads" or something like that.
Also, using stock phrases—especially ones that are overused—where a word would do ("however" or something along those lines) is often discouraged.
I have the same cringe. I think it comes from feeling inserted as a pretense to authority by writing style. Other examples I cringe at: The use of the word "titular", the phrase "abc cum def", ... For whatever reason they sound pretentious like the author is using them to show off, not to actually inform.
Some others are "I've said it once and I'll say it again", "as I said/wrote/posted/blogged before". Those seem to suggest the author is assuming they are famous/popular enough that their previous content has been read. Of course you could look at it as they are just suggesting you go read their previous post but for whatever reason that specific way of saying it comes across less as info and more as "of course you read my previous post".
I'm aware this is a personal opinion with no basis in reality.
When I was first exposed to Medium (which was before I started coding), the coolaborative notes and highlights really felt like what I would want a literature github to be.
Just as a thought experiment, it's interesting that I think nothing of forking and maintaining a codebase for personal use, but I can't imagine participating in the writing of stories in the same way. Literature seems to maintain the primacy of the 'maintainer', but if I think about the evolution of storytelling generally, this doesn't seem to have always been the case
>"This may be a particular peeve of mine and no one else’s, but I note it, because it’s my book: Name-dropping, for no better reason than to show off, under-appreciated novels, obscure foreign films, or cherished indie bands by having one’s characters irrelevantly reading or watching or listening to them is massively sore-thumbish. A novel is not a blog post about Your Favorite Things.[5] If you must do this sort of thing—and, seriously, must you?—contextualize heavily."
Even worse is the dissonance that comes when you consider that the author is treating this like a celebration of pop-culture that he loves, while in-universe this is the result of incredibly poor and culturally oppressed people desperately memorizing a dead guy's favorite stuff to try and get all the wealth he stumbled into and then hoarded until his death.
The book is basically an elaborate setup for "nostalgia and trivia save the world", so I'm pretty sure this is an example of an author deliberately flaunting a rule and trying to make it work rather than stumbling into it accidentally. As someone that loves nerding out about various media, I liked reading a book for once about characters that did too. (I'd like to see that more, but hopefully as less of a center-stage beating-the-reader-over-the-head-with-it sort of way in the future.)
I think this goes either way. In referencing these things, you alienate an audience that hasn't seen them, but I can think of a lot of artists with small but dedicated followings that do this. If a demographic identifies with your taste in e.g. movies, they will keep reading because they feel like they identify more with you by proxy.
Reading Humboldt's Gift, by Saul Bellow, I could have made a gigantic list of things I had never read or often even heard of, and still left out about half the references I didn't see because I didn't know they were references.
I think this can go both ways. If it's a constant stream of references, it can be obnoxious and feel like showing off. On the other hand, an occasional reference can give life to character without going out of your way to do it.
A good guide on writing, that is on organization the presentation of ideas and structuring written arguments (not a book on usage and style) is Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brookes: 'Modern Rhetoric'.
In another piece of writing advise I read, the author said not to use physical descriptors in place of names (such as "the redhead") because it reduced the character to a single aspect.
Also I can't tell what's wrong with Jackson's passage: I assume it has something to do with Graves/gravely, but I don't know why it's wrong.
All in all, writing code seems much easier for me.
I know why this happens. When you sit down to write, you don't know what exactly you're going to say. You may even be anxious about it. Then, an idea sparks your imagination and you start writing stuff. The warmup that comes out initially gets you on track. Nothing wrong with that.
The harm is keeping that crap in the post. Delete it! If I don't understand what I'm about to read in the first paragraph, I'm probably done.
Something else I don't like: writers who use too many words. The telltale sign of a first draft is the vast quantity of words (and even entire sentences) that don't need to be there.
A single edit with the goal of ruthlessly eliminating every unnecessary word works wonders for any first draft.
Edit: On the topic of fiction, the author gives a beautiful example from the Wizard of Oz:
> When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothin but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else. [continues]
I haven't read the book but this passage alone makes me want to.