5 ms·

Reading the abstract reminded me that so many people don't understand effective communication. The academic essay style is a travesty of global proportions. Eff

Reading the abstract reminded me that so many people don't understand effective communication. The academic essay style is a travesty of global proportions. Effective communication would start with the conclusion section, then the body, and leave the intro out. Make your statement quickly, and then expand upon it for whoever wants to keep reading. Saying, "in this essay I will tell you what I learned" is not going to keep me reading. Give me the high level points, then expand upon them!

baxtr 8y ago
Yip yip. It’s called “top-down” communication and every good newspaper does it exactly like you describe
thisiszilff 8y ago
That is the academic style! The academic style is effective communication, the problem is there's a lot of bad essays.
- heliodor 8y ago
  The standard academic essay style in the United States is: 1) An intro starting what you want to discuss or accomplish 2) The body, or details 3) The conclusion, or summary Effective communication starts with a brief explanation of your conclusions or points, then it goes into details.
  - gwern 8y ago
    You forgot: 0) an abstract.
  - komuW 8y ago
    ''The standard academic essay style in the United States is:'' Not everyone is in/from the USA. And not everyone cares about standards from the USA. Communication can still be effective without following made up standards by one country.
    - heliodor 8y ago
      The paper is written in that style, which is why I brought it up. I'm sure it's used in countries other than the US too, I just don't know the details. My point was that his communication would be more effective if he did not follow that standard.
segmondy 8y ago
Give him a break, it's obvious that English is not his first language. The article is about mistake and learning about his startup, but you have moved the topic to his style of writing. Seriously, you do realize HN is worldwide right and many of us don't speak English as first languages?
- probably_wrong 8y ago
  I don't think it's a first/second language issue, but rather a "how to present ideas in written form" issue. The GP is not criticizing typos, but rather the way in which the article is structured. If the post were written in Spanish it would have the same issues - just in Spanish rather than English. I actually think the (quite nice) blog formatting might be partially at fault: whenever I read a paper, I expect a certain style of writing and ideas presented in a certain way. By presenting it visually as a paper and then using a casual blog style, my first thought is not "this blog post is okay" but rather "this paper is bad".
wpietri 8y ago
I really appreciate any post-mortem like this, so I don't want to be too critical. But the document itself helps demonstrate one of the reasons for failure: poor user focus. The faux-academic-paper style looks cool, but is a clearly worse reading experience. It's tolerable on a big screen. But on a small laptop it requires pointlessly scrolling up and down. On mobile, it's much worse. A lesson declared in the document is "too slow iterating". But I think that's a symptom. I think the real lesson is that instead of building to the founder's vision of what's cool, you have to build for actual people and their actual needs. To do that well, you of course have test your hypotheses, which requires iteration. But the iteration itself is secondary; building the founder's fantasy iteratively can fail just at thoroughly as building it in one long go. Either way, it's self indulgence. I'd say the blog format has the same build-what-I-think-is-cool flaw. It's more excusable in a personal website, of course. But I hope he learns this lesson before his next startup.
- heliodor 8y ago
  Agreed. The writing style, formatting, design, and so on, of that blog post contain a handful of symptoms of potentially major problems in the way he went about building the business.
dermur 8y ago
Maybe it's because I'm reading so many, but it feels like ICO whitepapers have helped revive this style too...

baxtr 8y ago

Yip yip. It’s called “top-down” communication and every good newspaper does it exactly like you describe

thisiszilff 8y ago

That is the academic style! The academic style is effective communication, the problem is there's a lot of bad essays.

heliodor 8y ago
The standard academic essay style in the United States is: 1) An intro starting what you want to discuss or accomplish 2) The body, or details 3) The conclusion, or summary Effective communication starts with a brief explanation of your conclusions or points, then it goes into details.
- gwern 8y ago
  You forgot: 0) an abstract.
- komuW 8y ago
  ''The standard academic essay style in the United States is:'' Not everyone is in/from the USA. And not everyone cares about standards from the USA. Communication can still be effective without following made up standards by one country.
  - heliodor 8y ago
    The paper is written in that style, which is why I brought it up. I'm sure it's used in countries other than the US too, I just don't know the details. My point was that his communication would be more effective if he did not follow that standard.

segmondy 8y ago

Give him a break, it's obvious that English is not his first language. The article is about mistake and learning about his startup, but you have moved the topic to his style of writing. Seriously, you do realize HN is worldwide right and many of us don't speak English as first languages?

probably_wrong 8y ago
I don't think it's a first/second language issue, but rather a "how to present ideas in written form" issue. The GP is not criticizing typos, but rather the way in which the article is structured. If the post were written in Spanish it would have the same issues - just in Spanish rather than English. I actually think the (quite nice) blog formatting might be partially at fault: whenever I read a paper, I expect a certain style of writing and ideas presented in a certain way. By presenting it visually as a paper and then using a casual blog style, my first thought is not "this blog post is okay" but rather "this paper is bad".

wpietri 8y ago

I really appreciate any post-mortem like this, so I don't want to be too critical. But the document itself helps demonstrate one of the reasons for failure: poor user focus. The faux-academic-paper style looks cool, but is a clearly worse reading experience. It's tolerable on a big screen. But on a small laptop it requires pointlessly scrolling up and down. On mobile, it's much worse. A lesson declared in the document is "too slow iterating". But I think that's a symptom. I think the real lesson is that instead of building to the founder's vision of what's cool, you have to build for actual people and their actual needs. To do that well, you of course have test your hypotheses, which requires iteration. But the iteration itself is secondary; building the founder's fantasy iteratively can fail just at thoroughly as building it in one long go. Either way, it's self indulgence. I'd say the blog format has the same build-what-I-think-is-cool flaw. It's more excusable in a personal website, of course. But I hope he learns this lesson before his next startup.

heliodor 8y ago
Agreed. The writing style, formatting, design, and so on, of that blog post contain a handful of symptoms of potentially major problems in the way he went about building the business.

dermur 8y ago

Maybe it's because I'm reading so many, but it feels like ICO whitepapers have helped revive this style too...