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Comment by null_object | Hacker News Reader

>pattern 1: making outdated assumptions about the audience’s knowledge

>pattern 2: having inconsistent expectations of the reader’s knowledge

>pattern 3: strained analogies

>pattern 4: pretty pictures on confusing explanations...

edit: I understand you're trying to help, but... Your post simply listing the 'titles' of each of the categories is ironically itself an example of exactly the problem the blog-post is discussing: your bare list implies that these are all known rhetorical devices (assuming knowledge) whereas the blogger is attempting to articulate the reasons why these categories are confusing for the reader/learner.

In other words, the value of the blog-post is in the detail, not in some list that can be summarized like this as a tl;dr.

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I have to disagree. And to each is own.

Having read the article I found that list painted a clear picture and summed up the patterns nicely.

If one reads that and wants more, read the article.

(Not authors)Pattern 13: Using excessive prose where less will do

> I have to disagree. And to each is own. > Having read the article I found that list painted a clear picture and summed up the patterns nicely.

> (Not authors)Pattern 13: Using excessive prose where less will do

Ok I guess we simply have to assume that people know the underlying explanations for why assumed knowledge is a bad pattern.

> Pattern 13: Using excessive prose where less will do

That's just a mix of #1 and #2. "Excessive" prose is usually people trying to provide nuance through language with the assumptions others will be familiar enough with that type of language for it to provide benefit. Different words have slightly different connotations which can help if people understand those differences.

Fundamentally, it's the same problem as using acronyms that people aren't comfortable with to immediately parse so they don't cause extra mental load.

The alternative is to make everything really simple, but the lost nuance can affect communication negatively as well, as Randal Munroe's Thousand Word Challenge showed.

Sometimes a lengthy explanation is just a lazy stream of consciousness.

“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” — Blaise Pascal.

I have a team member at work like you while me being the complete opposite. I am not sure I still understand them well enough to say whether they are just stupid or it’s me. But frankly at least once already there was a situation where they said that my explanation was too vague and I didn’t listen and then month later I re-read what I wrote and it was indeed vague now :)

So while I disagree a lot with your statement my experience told me that actually there’s a lot of truth to what you are saying.

I dunno... they each seem pretty self-evident.

They could be (and even seem) much more self-evident (and valuable as a tl;dr) if they were one-sentence summaries instead of a copy-paste of a paragraph from the beginning of the linked page.

Its a tl;dr. If you write 12 sentences its hardly a tl;dr summary anymore.

I thought it was a pretty self-evident summary. The article is great too and goes in more detail, but i have trouble imagining anyone saw that summary post, and was like "pattern 11: no examples" - i have no idea what that could possibly mean

The article also has that list at the start, so duplicating it here in the comments is just noise.

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