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Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

This has been how storytelling has been done for centuries, it’s a a mark of thoughtful feature writing. The Atlantic is over 100 years old and extremely prestigious, it’s resonable to assume that at least from a technical writing standpoint they know what they are doing and do it on purpose.

It’s not writing intended for a textbook or academic paper. It’s a story. You’re supposed to read it and get introduced to things and discover the themes of the story gradually.

I see a variation of this criticism of a long form feature about every week or so on HN. It’s sort of equivalent to a person walking into a modern art museum and asking why the artists didn’t just paint the pictures so they look exactly like the thing the artist was looking at when he painted the picture.

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I believe you're thinking of an attention step, an immersion into a human interest aspect of the story before the formulaic structure of a traditional introduction. I have no problem with an attention step. I'm using one right now in a paper I hope to have published.

What I object to is an article ostensibly on Topic A that spends the first 60% completely ignoring Topic A in favor of Topic B, only to draw the most fleeting and hand-wavy of analogies between the two, and subsequently pretending as if the author had presented some work of scholarship on Topic A.

"Until halfway through" was not an exaggeration in my original comment.

>spends the first 60% completely ignoring [biology]

Only if you ignore the literal second paragraph:

>Even neurons are formed by habit. When continuously exposed to a fixed stimulus, neurons become steadily less sensitive to that stimulus—until they eventually stop responding to it altogether.

My dear friend, I'm afraid you've misread either my comment or the article. Topic A, the ostensible subject of the article, is not "biology." Cheers!

As someone who's first language is not English it comes off more as a mark of pedant writing. Some folks might enjoy the "storytelling", but it's really annoying when the author goes in circles and gets nowhere until you've read more than half of the text. Like that joke that goes on forever and ends without a punchline, that some people tell when they just want to pull your leg. And whether it's done by the centuries-old extremely-prestigious my-dad-is-very-important The Atlantic or some random person's blog it's just as annoying.

There’s certainly no judgment made, in the sense that I think people should consume whatever media they prefer. If you don’t enjoy long form feature writing in English you shouldn’t read it.

My comment is intended to point out the genre. The comments on this article are like people complaining that rap music doesn’t have enough melody, or jazz music isn’t catchy enough, or whatever.

It’s an unwillingness to understand the concept. Some of us are pretty damn glad The Atlantic, Harpers, and The New Yorker, among others, are still around. The world isn’t running short of thinly narrated to-the-point content.

A lot of writing in english is designed for people who _are_ comfortable reading it.

Also I believe the term they use for this kind of runaround is to 'bury the lede'. There was a bit of discussion on it on HN earlier in the year.

It’s not writing intended for a textbook or academic paper. It’s a story. You’re supposed to read it and get introduced to things and discover the themes of the story gradually.

I didn't discover crap.

Lost my attention way before I skimmed over to the near-end where they started making the connection to exaggeration. Not because my attention span is that low but, rather, 99% of newspaper articles and columns are without much substance and I really need some assurance that the long story is worth reading.

But, generally, if I want a story I'll read a novel.

For anything else, give me the point. If the point is really good, you'll probably have me hooked for listening in for more.

So you're saying that all stories, no matter their natural size or content, should be padded out to novel length and published as a book?

If you want short form bare facts soulless prose, you shouldn't leave twitter

Why are you putting words in their mouth? That’s rude. So is the recommendation that someone should only read Twitter if they thought this article under delivered. Wikipedia is a great example of high information density and easy navigation to the matter you’re interested in.

>Why are you putting words in their mouth?

Because when we say X we don't just say X, we also signal and imply a lot of other things.

> That's rude.

Whereas the response "I didn't discover crap" is polite?

In the age of tweets, memes, and captions, it has simply become such criticism to even surface to the top. I usually ignore critiques of long form story telling.

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