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Many of the sentences in this paragraph suffer from one of the following defects: poor grammar, redundancy, excessive jargon, excessive use of metaphor ("as a t
by dprice1 16y ago
Many of the sentences in this paragraph suffer from one of the following defects: poor grammar, redundancy, excessive jargon, excessive use of metaphor ("as a toy ... dodo's game ... chips on the table", "gearing up to bet big"), and spelling mistakes. This greatly reduces the credibility of the author. The use of comma to connect sentence fragments improperly is really painful: "Web developers are happy, but all the other platform hackers are sad, flash, silverlight, ...". The literal meaning of this sentence is that "other platform hackers" are, among other things, "flash".
The paragraph's construction makes it hard for the reader to know what the main point is. At the beginning of the paragraph, I was lead to believe that the topic of the paragraph was the lineage and evolution of HTML5 and its emergence from a previous failure. Halfway through, the topic shifts ("Implicitly,") to discuss the implications of the technology. In the third half, it seeks to get to a "bottom line," which seems to be "you should care about HTML5."
The lack of hyperlinks and references has several knock-on effects. The first is that claims made ("Some dismiss") smell like straw man arguments or like hyperbolic statements ("there will be no more versions of html"). Another effect is that the reader is left with no way to learn more, making this a pretty shocking example of the failure to use hypertext (ironically, to discuss hypertext markup technology).
Some recommendations: (1) Print out the paragraph, take a pen, and start crossing things out. Seek to reduce the number of words. (2) Read your work out loud, as you would read a book to a child. Not as you would talk to a buddy over a beer. (3) Review some books on clear writing.
- contextfree 16y agothe "dodo's game" bit actually make me wonder if he was playing some word game, like not using certain letters or making the numeric values of the letters in all the sentences have a certain sum or something. it struck me less as ordinary bad writing and more as just really weird, something that you'd only come up with under artificial restrictions.
- voidfiles 16y agoThis was really helpful. I'll I can say is that I am going to take this, and get better. Some people might wonder if I actually tried to edit, I did; this isn't me being lazy. So, feedback like this is helpful. Well, not linking to source material that is lazy. I went to college, 4 years, in a program that had a fair amount of writing. I never thought I was a good writer, but I never got a good take down like this. Even from my teachers, I wonder if they just saw it as a lost cause. Anyways, thanks.
- dprice1 16y agoI forgot two more suggestions: One is to find a writing buddy. Edit (and by that, I mean critique, not rewrite) each other's work, and offer comments back and forth. Establish some ground rules so that you don't get angry at each other. I personally think this is best done in person. When I need to communicate something important at work, I'll almost always ask a trusted coworker to help me read and edit my writing. Without fail, they will see several things I missed. I try to self-edit and, I can offer a suggestion from my own experience. I strongly suggest using a pen on a paper copy. This takes you out of the context in which you originally wrote the work-- your computer and keyboard. You can step away from your desk and go somewhere with a different context. A library, coffee shop, or outside under a tree are good places to rethink and rewrite. And finally, I hope we'll see a revised version of your HTML5 paragraph-- you've clearly hit on an idea appealing to HN readers...
- muhfuhkuh 16y agoIf you're truly serious about improving your writing, the indispensable guide is "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser. It even contains an example page out of his early draft of the book that is literally festooned with (his own) editing markup. Alot of successful writing is in clear thinking (not being overly emotional at the moment helps immensely), then paring down of thoughts, _then_ writing, and then finally (and most importantly) editing. I always find saving a draft and sleeping on it before reading it back to yourself prior to sending/saving/publishing often helps.
- ghettobillgates 16y agoYou are the biggest douche asshole on HN and probably the biggest idiot as far not being able to understand someones post because they have poor grammar/writing skills. I could give this to my little sister and she would be able to understand it. Delete your account from here you asshole.