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OK, normally I wouldn't nitpick on grammar, but I don't think it's nitpicking when it's central to what's being said, and in fact the opening sentence: This is

OK, normally I wouldn't nitpick on grammar, but I don't think it's nitpicking when it's central to what's being said, and in fact the opening sentence: This is a guide on how to blog insightful. Not insightfully. Because insightful isn't a writing style, it's a type of idea. Insightfully is an adverb, insightful an adjective. You can blog insightfully. You can write insightful blog posts. But how do you blog insightful? To me, that makes the opening sentence of the post a confused jumble of words, which made me skim over what might otherwise have been a good read. Can someone please enlighten me as to what he's trying to express? And just to drive the point home, let's modify it slightly. See if the following makes sense: This is a guide on how to wait patient. Not patiently. Because patient isn't a waiting style, it's a type of... I went back and read the first few paragraphs properly. It seems that what he's trying to say is "how to increase the insight of your readers, instead of merely displaying your own insight". Maybe not a snappy opening line, but at least it can be understood. Please don't open your blog posts by re-defining common words. It detracts from your writing, which may otherwise be excellent.

jamesbritt 17y ago
"Please don't open your blog posts by re-defining common words. It detracts from your writing, which may otherwise be excellent." Quite true. I tried reading the post but was distracted by the hackneyed technique of asserting some new, unneeded, word usage. As I read I keep thinking, no this is about how to write an insightful item; i.e. to write insightfully. Where's his real point, the one that justifies the awkward opening text? One insight I got was, "Don't be too clever." Just say what you want to say.
Alex3917 17y ago
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/12rdq/saddam_died_beautiful/c12sbn http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/12rdq/saddam_die... I was using that construction. That is, it's an adjective with 'ideas' as the implied noun, because I want to emphasize that it's the structure of the ideas underlying the writing that determine whether or not that writing is insightful. edit: See also 'think different'.
- daveungerer 17y ago
  Let's run with your Saddam example. When you say "He died beautiful", you mean that he was beautiful at the time of dying, but the dying is purely incidental to him being beautiful. You could also say "He died insightful", which would mean that he was an insightful man at the time of dying, but the dying is once again incidental to him being insightful. Now, logic breaks down when you say "He blogged insightful", but I'll analyse it anyway. Here you're saying that he was an insightful person, who happened to be blogging. But you're not relating his insight to the blogging at all, so it makes no sense to tell us that he was an insightful man at the time he happened to be blogging. English isn't my first language, but I'm pretty sure the above is correct.
- kristiandupont 17y ago
  Interesting. I always thought of the "think different" slogan as meaning "think of this a something different" - similar to the common use of "read". How do you interpret it?
jacobolus 17y ago
I don’t think you missed a whole lot. The examples linked are interesting, but the argument is just an attempt to classify arguments about phenomena/abstractions. The classification doesn’t really shed much insight on how those phenomena or abstractions work, or explain where “less-insightful” essays/articles go wrong. Basically it comes down to: “If you wrote something interesting its primary argument might have been of this form, or this form, or this form. End.” From the “conclusion”: > Once you understand the formula above, it should become trivially easy to create an indefinite number of insights. Sorry, but there’s no shortcut for generating insight. It requires deeply understanding something and then clearly explaining it, both of which are hard work. ------- Just so this comment isn’t a waste, here’s a link to a Hofstadter essay about how (he claims) cognition works, which should shed some insight into how arguments in general are structured: http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/analogy.html http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/analogy.h...
- Alex3917 17y ago
  "The classification doesn’t really shed much insight on how those phenomena or abstractions work, or explain where 'less-insightful' essays/articles go wrong." So in part two I explain the difference between insightful/informative/interesting/funny, and argue for a different evolutionary role for each. I think once you get the whole theory it will be more clear how this becomes actionable.
  - jacobolus 17y ago
    I started writing some point-by-point comments about your essay, but that ended up long enough to just make me seem like a jerk. Anyway, I have issues with everything from your premise (“generating insight is trivial”), through your specific structure (how you classify these argument styles), and the examples you use to back them up (several of which I think are either trivial or wrong), to the language at the word level (words like “actionable” are just MBA technobabble). My suggestion would be to read a couple books on rhetoric, or maybe on construction of philosophical arguments. These topics have been studied intensively (insightfully!) since at least the Greeks.
holygoat 17y ago
Yup. I got about two sentences in before I hit Cmd-W in disgust.
- rwolf 17y ago
  You just barely missed the kicker: The Oxford American Dictionary defines insight as...
derefr 17y ago
It seemed like point-free style to me. "Blog insightful x", where x is {ideas, posts, articles, etc}, but dropping the x.
- daveungerer 17y ago
  How to blog insightful cows. No, that doesn't work. If you can't put your finger on what's going on here, you need to first learn what an intransitive verb is. Then, that "blog" is such a verb (from the OS X dictionary, which I assume is based on common usage, seeing that it's such a new word). "Sleep" is another example of such a verb. You don't sleep the bed any more than you blog the post (or the cow). That's why we have the word "write". Now, would you even say "How to write insightful" rather than "How to write insightful posts"? Because if you would, you actually want to be saying "How to write insightfully" - writing insightfully is the act of writing "insightful x", but dropping the x. You see, they already thought of that. Grammar acrobatics should be left to people who have a very strong command of the language - it will destroy your writing otherwise.
  - derefr 17y ago
    Blog is transitive, with an assumed object. Here's just the results for the phrase "blogged the results" http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&q=%22blogged+the+results%22&meta=&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai= http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls=... (43k hits); similar numbers can be found for "blogged X" for pretty much every X (and it adds up to a lot.) It's a usage that began with newspapers sometime in the middle of last year, I believe, but it caught on fiercely. The point of the title, as I can read it, was to avoid being parsed as "how to write insightful posts." The author went off on "how to write" as a set phrase because it implied that one was about to talk about the mechanics of writing (grammar, diction, style, etc.) rather than the content. I believe this whole thing could have been fixed as thus: "How to find insights to blog" or even more simply: "What to blog" or, now that I think about it, the simplest of all, with the least change: "How to be insightful". Because that's what the author really wanted to show with the rest of his post—how to be an insightful person that would then have insightful things to blog.

jamesbritt 17y ago

"Please don't open your blog posts by re-defining common words. It detracts from your writing, which may otherwise be excellent." Quite true. I tried reading the post but was distracted by the hackneyed technique of asserting some new, unneeded, word usage. As I read I keep thinking, no this is about how to write an insightful item; i.e. to write insightfully. Where's his real point, the one that justifies the awkward opening text? One insight I got was, "Don't be too clever." Just say what you want to say.

Alex3917 17y ago

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/12rdq/saddam_died_beautiful/c12sbn http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/12rdq/saddam_die... I was using that construction. That is, it's an adjective with 'ideas' as the implied noun, because I want to emphasize that it's the structure of the ideas underlying the writing that determine whether or not that writing is insightful. edit: See also 'think different'.

daveungerer 17y ago
Let's run with your Saddam example. When you say "He died beautiful", you mean that he was beautiful at the time of dying, but the dying is purely incidental to him being beautiful. You could also say "He died insightful", which would mean that he was an insightful man at the time of dying, but the dying is once again incidental to him being insightful. Now, logic breaks down when you say "He blogged insightful", but I'll analyse it anyway. Here you're saying that he was an insightful person, who happened to be blogging. But you're not relating his insight to the blogging at all, so it makes no sense to tell us that he was an insightful man at the time he happened to be blogging. English isn't my first language, but I'm pretty sure the above is correct.
kristiandupont 17y ago
Interesting. I always thought of the "think different" slogan as meaning "think of this a something different" - similar to the common use of "read". How do you interpret it?

jacobolus 17y ago

I don’t think you missed a whole lot. The examples linked are interesting, but the argument is just an attempt to classify arguments about phenomena/abstractions. The classification doesn’t really shed much insight on how those phenomena or abstractions work, or explain where “less-insightful” essays/articles go wrong. Basically it comes down to: “If you wrote something interesting its primary argument might have been of this form, or this form, or this form. End.” From the “conclusion”: > Once you understand the formula above, it should become trivially easy to create an indefinite number of insights. Sorry, but there’s no shortcut for generating insight. It requires deeply understanding something and then clearly explaining it, both of which are hard work. ------- Just so this comment isn’t a waste, here’s a link to a Hofstadter essay about how (he claims) cognition works, which should shed some insight into how arguments in general are structured: http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/analogy.html http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/analogy.h...

Alex3917 17y ago
"The classification doesn’t really shed much insight on how those phenomena or abstractions work, or explain where 'less-insightful' essays/articles go wrong." So in part two I explain the difference between insightful/informative/interesting/funny, and argue for a different evolutionary role for each. I think once you get the whole theory it will be more clear how this becomes actionable.
- jacobolus 17y ago
  I started writing some point-by-point comments about your essay, but that ended up long enough to just make me seem like a jerk. Anyway, I have issues with everything from your premise (“generating insight is trivial”), through your specific structure (how you classify these argument styles), and the examples you use to back them up (several of which I think are either trivial or wrong), to the language at the word level (words like “actionable” are just MBA technobabble). My suggestion would be to read a couple books on rhetoric, or maybe on construction of philosophical arguments. These topics have been studied intensively (insightfully!) since at least the Greeks.

holygoat 17y ago

Yup. I got about two sentences in before I hit Cmd-W in disgust.

rwolf 17y ago
You just barely missed the kicker: The Oxford American Dictionary defines insight as...

derefr 17y ago

It seemed like point-free style to me. "Blog insightful x", where x is {ideas, posts, articles, etc}, but dropping the x.

daveungerer 17y ago
How to blog insightful cows. No, that doesn't work. If you can't put your finger on what's going on here, you need to first learn what an intransitive verb is. Then, that "blog" is such a verb (from the OS X dictionary, which I assume is based on common usage, seeing that it's such a new word). "Sleep" is another example of such a verb. You don't sleep the bed any more than you blog the post (or the cow). That's why we have the word "write". Now, would you even say "How to write insightful" rather than "How to write insightful posts"? Because if you would, you actually want to be saying "How to write insightfully" - writing insightfully is the act of writing "insightful x", but dropping the x. You see, they already thought of that. Grammar acrobatics should be left to people who have a very strong command of the language - it will destroy your writing otherwise.
- derefr 17y ago
  Blog is transitive, with an assumed object. Here's just the results for the phrase "blogged the results" http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&q=%22blogged+the+results%22&meta=&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai= http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls=... (43k hits); similar numbers can be found for "blogged X" for pretty much every X (and it adds up to a lot.) It's a usage that began with newspapers sometime in the middle of last year, I believe, but it caught on fiercely. The point of the title, as I can read it, was to avoid being parsed as "how to write insightful posts." The author went off on "how to write" as a set phrase because it implied that one was about to talk about the mechanics of writing (grammar, diction, style, etc.) rather than the content. I believe this whole thing could have been fixed as thus: "How to find insights to blog" or even more simply: "What to blog" or, now that I think about it, the simplest of all, with the least change: "How to be insightful". Because that's what the author really wanted to show with the rest of his post—how to be an insightful person that would then have insightful things to blog.