Comment by samhw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by samhw | Hacker News Reader

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I think it's probably not a good idea to read comments about your writing on the internet. They aren't sending them 'to you' - you've sought out this discussion - so it's on you if you choose to read people's opinions.

If you want constructive advice: try to write in the same way that you would talk. Shallowly, that means read your writing out loud – what Flaubert called his 'gueulade' – or, even better, vice versa: write down your spoken thoughts. More deeply it means not saying anything that you wouldn't say in real life. Get to the point, ditch the fluff, treat it like a (garrulous, one-sided) phone call. Have your point constantly at the front of your mind, and only say what's absolutely necessary to explain or justify it. It will improve your writing immensely.

Oh, and read Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language': https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli.... If pressed for time, then particularly the last third or so. His advice is the best you can ever hear as a writer. Reflect on your good fortune: by writing this, you've now identified what makes good writing.

Hey, thanks for your comment. I took a walk in the sunshine to decompress a bit and before I go I just wanted to pop back on to explain a couple of things. I didn't seek this out. I don't really go looking for such discussions because I'm a bit too time-starved, but someone let me know they shared my article on here because they liked it so I checked it out. Because I don't go looking for this, this hasn't really happened before (as far as I know) and it's a bit jarring to see people make assumptions about my intelligence for conforming to a style guide for accessibility reasons and practicing what the product preaches. I want to also mention that whilst I'm sure you're trying to be helpful and not condescending, I have read Flaubert and I've read Orwell, his fiction and his work on the English Language. I have a Masters Degree in English so I've read quite a lot lol, I sound like a dickhead saying that. I only say that to contextualise that I like a lot of 18th and 19th-century Lit which has a lot of long, winding sentences; my own writing took on that character and I struggled for a long time to adapt my writing style. So if it's coming across disjointed then that's something I need to take on board because I'm writing in a style that isn't mine. Ultimately it is compliance - someone called it aggressive compliance, I can't really comment on that. Readability compliance is actually really important when it comes to inclusivity and vital things like medical literacy, which is just one of the reasons people use our product. With this being said, its effect on writing style is obviously something I need to feed back for product development so we can continue making a better, more nuanced tool. We've already made a lot of progress from readability calculators from the past and want to keep improving this technology. I'm not shy about criticism, I haven't even been shy about my username. But yeah, I don't even go here, so I don't know what the critique environment is like. Thank you for taking the time to write this, I do appreciate you're coming from a good place here.

I think one of the contributors to toxic positivity is to try to head off subthreads like this.

I spend more time than I’d like adding in positive language around everything because people overreact to anything not super positive. So to avoid people misinterpreting my comments, Ill usually add in lots of “a+,” blue ribbon, superpowers, etc blargh.

I appreciate you writing your article and participating in this thread but think we’re part of the problem.

If people are better able to accept criticism, then we’ll get more reality. Until then, I’m more likely to comment positively or not comment at all on the very likely chance that the author jumps into a thread and spazzes out on me.

I think you were trying to empathize, but I don’t think a master’s in English is necessarily useful for the topics brought up in this thread. Without more context (school, projects, interests, performance) I don’t think there’s any correlation between masters in English and ability to read and write well.

Eh, I think a Master's in English is good (a fortiori) proof that they know how to string a sentence together. I am still absolutely mystified at how they wrote that flatulent nonsense. And I mean truly, genuinely mystified, not 'mystified' as in 'clearly suspecting X or Y but not wanting to say'. It's now 100% beyond doubt, in my mind, that they are capable of writing far better than that, indeed very well by any standard, even within some given register[0]. I also don't at all buy their explanation of 'malicious compliance', considering their hurt, piqued responses to the criticism in this thread. Every possibility here makes very little sense to me.

[0] Not in a Dr Jekyll scenario, not even if in some Parfit-esque farce their brain were indexterously bisected with cheese wire and not either half but the intervenient dribble of corpus callosum attained sentience would said brain-dribble even in its admitted abjection be left with the deficit in neuronal voltage absolutely required to bring that tripe into existence, no more than I could fake a Pollock, or Infinite Jest, or Finnegans Wake.

> someone let me know they shared my article on here because they liked it so I checked it out.

> I didn’t seek this out.

Oh, come on.

> Ultimately it is compliance - someone called it aggressive compliance, I can't really comment on that.

Hmm, I suppose either the house style mandates what I would consider extremely poor writing (I won’t belabour the reasons), or the house style mandates some broadly formal style and the challenge is to write well within it. If the former, I suppose you should take my comments as applying to the house style and not your own writing ability; if the latter, I’d more or less reiterate what I said, and I doubt any non-insane style guide would, say, forbid you to use plain Anglo-Saxon words, vary your sentence length, write grammatically, etc.

In either case I admit I find it very bewildering to reconcile your well written comment with the solecisms and illiteracies that post was littered with*, or to make sense of your coming here to read and grow upset at criticism of a post which – given your now-evident possession of a brain stem – you must surely have known was atrociously written.

Thanks for your civil response, and for your taking my comment in the same spirit. It wasn't meant as a personal attack, no. It was meant to be an impersonal attack: all I knew of you was that piece of writing, and that was all I wanted to consider. Hopefully** my comment contributes to better instructing whoever and/or whatever was or were responsible for that lobotomised dross!

* With which that post… **Yeah, yeah, ok

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