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Comment by Errancer | Hacker News Reader

I agree, often I write first sentence in technical language to introduce the reader to the existing discussion and then say "In other words" to paraphrase the technical language into more familiar but less precise vocabulary.

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I'd rather do the opposite. I'd start with the intuitive high-level idea and then introduce technical terms and formality to the prepared mind.

As they say every rule has its exceptions and I think all three variants can be suitable.

I agree, but even in those cases, “in other words” is just throat-clearing. Like “simply put” or “that is to say”, these are noise words that only hurt the clarity of writing.

If two examples help, use two examples. There’s no need to call out that the second one is another example; people will get that.

At least that’s how I see it after a lifetime of trying to stamp out this kind of filler language in my own writing.

I agree with your description that this is a throat-clearing but I don't see why it hurts the clarity of writing. Dense texts packed with information can often benefit from such breaks. In general I find text which uses artefacts from spoken language more readable. There are limits to this of course but if we remove all redundancy we end up with dry text which sometimes is expected but I am unsure if it is the most readable or clear way to write. One side note is that it might be culture dependent. English speaking countries and Poland, where I am from, expect and teach much different writing style than France or Germany.

If it's two examples, it's not the same thing presented again in other words. If you are presenting the same thing twice phrased differently, separating the two presentations is important, and "in other words" is a perfectly reasonable phrase to do that.

Without beating around the bush, what I’m trying to say is, in other words, unless I’m mistaken, it’s perhaps possible that maybe some writing just could be written in fewer words.

Sir Humphrey Appleby, is that you?

In my experience, that’s a mistake. I start off by framing things in the “why” for a high level conceptual understanding and slowly get into the weeds.

The executives and the sponsors care about business objectives and they are going to zone out as soon as you start getting into the weeds.

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