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Titles aren't supposed to be comprehensive, and rhetoric in general is significantly less effective if you spend all your time carving out exceptions for differ
by da_chicken 8y ago
Titles aren't supposed to be comprehensive, and rhetoric in general is significantly less effective if you spend all your time carving out exceptions for differing opinions. Titles are supposed to get you to read the article and give you an idea of the topic.
If you read the article, it's clearly discussing the problems that they experienced. I don't see why they need to qualify everything they said with IMO, IMX, for us, in our case, etc. At no point in the article itself does the author assert that their experience will match yours. Quite the opposite; the author goes out of their way to describe their environment and why they were impacted in particular. At some point, the reader needs to assume that the author is only talking about what they're talking about -- their specific situation -- and not asserting some omnipotent will to obliterate your opinion or disagreement because they didn't add "(For Us)" to the title.
In other words, complaining that the title isn't explicitly subjective is probably the weakest criticism you could make because, at best, it's a criticism of a rhetorical style rather than any criticism of the substance of the piece. Not only is the reader more than capable of coming to that decision, not only can they be expected to do so if they actually read it, you're not actually disagreeing with anything the article says nor are you presenting any alternative opinion and you're certainly not providing any contrary evidence. You're disagreeing, but there's no substance to your disagreement. "I had to read the article to understand what it was actually about," is not really a criticism!
- otterley 8y ago> rhetoric in general is significantly less effective if you spend all your time carving out exceptions for differing opinions HN is aimed at an engineering audience, not a political one. I, and others like me (at least used to) come here for enlightenment, not rhetoric. Moreover, the article itself is not argumentative. It didn’t need to be spiced up with a provocative title to be valuable.
- da_chicken 8y agoRhetoric is not just writing persuasively. Rhetoric is about communicating effectively. Saying you don't need rhetoric because you're an engineer is like saying you don't care if people think you're telling the truth because you're an engineer. It's absurd. It doesn't matter if you're writing an opinion piece, a political piece, or a technical piece, if you want to structure your writing in a way that can be easily read, understood, and followed, you want to obey the principles of rhetoric.
- otterley 8y agoI'd like you to subject your theory to the most popular (i.e., most frequently cited) engineering writings in the past 30 years. How do they exemplify such rhetoric? And how does the reader benefit from whatever rhetoric you find in them?
- erichocean 8y agoGoto consider harmful
- otterley 8y agoOK, that one is pretty good. :)
- kekebo 8y agoDeliberately withholding details from a title to create more engagement based on a false impression of the content doesn't equal good rhetoric. If anything it hinges on clickbait. Calling it effective communication is the absurdity here.
- caprese 8y ago> It didn’t need to be spiced up with a provocative title to be valuable. Yes it did. HN title-fu is the same appeal to emotion as any political blog and is just as effective at surfacing stories, thanks to people just like you. You came to this thread and made your noise for pedantic reasons and helped surface it higher so the correct audience could actually see it
- jacobolus 8y ago> HN is aimed at an engineering audience i.e. strict pedants with no comprehension of/tolerance for ambiguity or emotion?