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I found this very hard to read. There are so many short sentences and bullet points that it looks like a PowerPoint presentation masquerading as prose. What he

I found this very hard to read. There are so many short sentences and bullet points that it looks like a PowerPoint presentation masquerading as prose. What he seems to have lost with this approach is a rhythm. It's a staccato battering with ideas. I'd much rather be seduced and cradled by writing that made me feel I'm learning by osmosis and not trepanning. EDIT: The author illustrates how his writing goes wrong by saying that the following paragraph: To be brief on the sentence-level, remove words that don’t add necessary context. Extra words cause readers to slow down and do extra work. That makes it harder for them to recognize the sentence’s point. And when you bore readers, they quit reading. is better rewritten as: Your sentence is brief when no additional words can be removed. Being succinct is important because filler buries your talking points and bores readers into quitting. It's not. The two sentence rewrite is ugly. The first sentence is weird because it uses "additional" (which sounds like adding something) for things that will be removed. The second sentence uses "talking points" which makes it appear the writer is aiming for sound bites and not to educate the reader. I much prefer the first paragraph above. Partly because it makes me empathize with the trouble readers might have and makes me want to work for them. When I read the first paragraph I imagine myself, the reader; when I read the second I'm being instructed by a voice that sounds like it comes from a cold machine.

JacobSuperslav 6y ago
I work with SEO, CRO, UX and I can confirm that this style of writing - short sentences, tiny paragraphs - results in better outcomes: time on page is higher and bounce rate is lower.
- jgrahamc 6y ago
  I wonder if those metrics are like that because this style of writing has the reader thinking that the author has something important to say and has to spend a long time figuring out what it is because the sentences have been cut to the bone.
  - JacobSuperslav 6y ago
    I honestly don't know, but the metrics rise on average, sending a positive signal to Google, which yields us higher rankings in Google, which equals more visitors. It's a constant battle between competitors -- finding out what the visitors want to read -- and how they want to read it.
- Veen 6y ago
  The title of the article is "Writing Well". It is not "Writing that Reduces Bounce Rates." These are not the same thing and marketing copy is not something every writer should seek to emulate.
  - capableweb 6y ago
    The thing is, "Well" in "Writing Well" needs to be defined, because everyone sees it differently. For some, "Writing Well" is writing in a way that gives the reader a emotional reaction, like lots of fiction tends to aim for. For others, "Writing Well" is deconstructing concepts so people can understand complex ideas easier, like what most of technical writing aims to do. For yet others, "Writing Well" is writing in a way that visitors on a website stays for longer and reduces bounce rates, like content marketing tries to do. Like many things in life, what you understand "well" to mean, changes how you need to do your writing. Sometimes you need to switch how you see "well", depending on your goals. There is no right or wrong answer what "well" actually means.
  - JacobSuperslav 6y ago
    This is Hacker News, so I assumed we're talking about websites/web apps, but you're right.
xenopticon 6y ago
Doesn't this depend a lot on _what_ and _where_ you are reading? I suspect people have completely different styles when reading e.g. a fiction book on a Kindle vs. a tutorial about deploying a Docker container. I wouldn't be surprised if generation/age played a factor too.
- coffeefirst 6y ago
  Absolutely. Academic writing has its own conventions that a lot of people have to unlearn when they leave that world, legal writing literally has its own grammar rules, etc. That said, the author strikes me as trying to teach something he isn't actually good at while pretending to be authorative. Most of this advice is standard stuff found in Strunk and White, Stephen King's "On Writing," and a hundred other solid books on this topic, but his style is disjointed, his examples aren't great, and then there's just the sheer silliness: > Why? The best writing is therapy that you publish for the world to learn from. No, it's really not.
cousin_it 6y ago
I think both versions are kinda lacking in rhythm. Here's my attempt, certainly imperfect too: If you make an effort to omit unnecessary words, your sentences will be easy for readers to understand without slowing down. It also reduces the chance that readers will get bored and quit. I used to uncritically accept the idea that concision was the single important thing about writing. The problem is, if you only ever write in short sentences, you'll neglect the skill of writing longer sentences that flow. And if you're writing anything longer than a tweet, you really need that skill! Having a natural mix of long and short sentences leads to a less "stuttery" feeling, and has a kind of hypnotic effect pulling the reader into your text and making them feel at home.
- tartoran 6y ago
  To avoid repeating the readers I would change to: “If you make an effort to omit unnecessary words, your sentences will be easy for readers to understand without slowing them down. It also reduces the chance that they will get bored and quit.”
- dctoedt 6y ago
  Or even: Try deleting words, lest your reader feel bogged down and give up — but brevity must serve clarity, so a few extra words might be worthwhile.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- nicoburns 6y ago
  I was taught in high school that I should alternate long and short sentences in order to keep writing interesting. It seems like a pretty good rule of thumb.
gclv 6y ago
As a sibling has said, writing to maximise engagement is a different beast from writing “well”. I’m sure some “growth hacker” types would argue for defining “well” in a way that’s quantifiable, hence the confusion. I personally find that style very annoying. It’s especially popular on LinkedIn. When I notice that I’m reading some vertically-set essay, it’s my cue to stop scrolling and stay off LinkedIn for the next month.
- ghaff 6y ago
  I've had people try to convince me to use one of those apps that supposedly help you write for better "engagement." Invariably, they just don't get it when I say I'm not interested.
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    I've been thinking about how useful raw engagement metrics actually are. Likes on your post or view on your video. These metrics count every reader and audience member equally, when they are far from equally relevant to you. By writing according to some common denominator you may trade a smaller high-quality audience off for a larger low-quality audience. For example if you want to promote your work, who cares if you get lots of views from people with small attention span and no deep interest? The goal is to put your thoughts out there into good hands (or minds). To foster collaboration, to get insightful feedback. (Or to make sales, but there again, consumers can have widely different behavior. Some have noted that pricing higher will get you a nicer user base.) Just one thoughtful reader may be worth a thousand inattentive bored scroller-clickers on LinkedIn. Because that one may write you an interesting message, which may lead to new opportunities, open up new communities for you. What do a thousand likes get you besides stroking your ego? I just don't see the value in that sort of mechanistic "karma farming".
    - ghaff 6y ago
      There's some value in raw numbers, especially at scale. It's reasonable for a company to care about how many views a product page, how to, or topic page gets. And it's a proxy for a lot of other things that are really hard to suss out. (Though you can measure things like how far people read/watch, time they spend, etc.) But for me personally, I mostly go by what I want to read and I don't really care if an SEO plug-in is telling me I should be writing at a sixth grade level--which is the level a lot of these tools work at. (And I'm often working with experienced editors who have a pretty good sense of what their audience/desired audience is looking for.) They're also not mostly ad-supported so there isn't a lot of incentive to go for pageviews for the sake of pageviews.
szszrk 6y ago
Your sentence is brief when no additional words can be removed. Being succinct is important because filler buries your talking points and bores readers into quitting. I find it harder to understand as well. I do get it but I see that a lot of my fellow non-native speakers will struggle with this kind of writing. Second sentence is way more complex then the whole original paragraph. "Succint", "filler", "buries", "bores into quitting" - whoah. Give me a breath, please! Is this an articatle on how to write good looking text, or easy to understand text? At first glance I though it was supposed to ilustrate the exact opposite of what it tries to ilustrate. The whole first page is composed of only bullet points and it requires a lot of focus and effort to go through. I had no urge to click to the next page after that introduction. Is it grandiose (had to google that), or do they treat me like an idiot? Bizarre. It's like reading a list of quotes from famous people. If you would read it aloud after 3 or 4 of these I'm done. Next ones could be a dinner recipe - I might not notice. When I write to much and too fast (like now I am, sorry!) I like to remind myself how authors write on sites for beginners in a particular language [0][1]. It's clean and doesn't treat me like an idiot. [0] https://www.nachrichtenleicht.de/ https://www.nachrichtenleicht.de/ [1] https://www.sr.de/ https://www.sr.de/
- PlugTunin 6y ago
  Is this an articatle on how to write good looking text, or easy to understand text? good question
appleflaxen 6y ago
Thanks for sharing your opinion. I found myself strongly agreeing with the post, and it's really helpful to get a counter-perspective.
nobody9999 6y ago
William Safire's Rules for Writers: Remember to never split an infinitive. The passive voice should never be used. Do not put statements in the negative form. Verbs have to agree with their subjects. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be by rereading and editing. ========= The above, plus Strunk & White[0], should be enough for most folks IMNSHO. [0] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37134 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37134
- ramblerman 6y ago
  > Proofread carefully to see if you words out. That omission almost seems too perfect
  - GavinMcG 6y ago
    That's the point. Each line violates the rule it states.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - nobody9999 6y ago
    >That omission almost seems too perfect It is perfect -- because William Safire was a wonderful writer[0]. I didn't care much for his politics, but that man could write! [0] https://www.nytimes.com/by/william-safire https://www.nytimes.com/by/william-safire
- goto11 6y ago
  I disagree with two of Safires points: There is nothing wrong with splitting an infinitive. Shakespeare does it and Star Trek does it. Passive voice is fine. Sure it can be used to make the text impersonal and hide responsibility. But is can also be used to make the text clearer and to emphasize what is important. Use it as appropriate.
  - 6y ago
jfk13 6y ago
Wouldn't it be simpler to just say something like: > Keep sentences brief; unnecessary filler obscures your point and bores the reader. "Brevity is the soul of wit."
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  There are different kinds of long windedness. One kind, that people most think about, is rambling, bringing up unimportant points, repeating something you've already said etc. The other kind is more on the wordsmithing level of formulating the same thing in fewer words by switching out longer, less dense grammatical structures with snappier ones. It's very much like refactoring code. You can do it on a higher level by cutting out entire chunks of code that don't really need to be done, or on a low level by being familiar with the language's helpful syntactic sugars, best practices, to make the meaning clear and less obscured by boilerplate and "syntactic chores". I noticed the effectiveness of low-level refactoring in prose when I first started writing academic papers. Since page limits are strict, you need to pay attention to eliminate any words that aren't necessary and are thin on semantics. This doesn't mean writing in staccato. But when you spot a paragraph where a single word spills over to an extra line, it requires a specific learnable skill to rewrite a sentence or two to eliminate the extra line. You can often tell how much someone wordsmithed around on a paper by seeing how long the last line of each paragraph is. Of course sometimes gains are on the high level, I'm not saying that good writing is just about messing with the low level of the actual words and the grammar. Similarly to the debate whether premature optimization is the root of all evil, it's about a balance in writing too. First you must have clear thoughts on what to say and what you can leave out. But at the end, when things have settled, it is worth to go over it once again at specific places and low-level edit things to be snappier, counting words, letters and millimeters on the paper.
  - jfk13 6y ago
    On the topic of brevity vs. long-windedness, I'm surprised nobody seems to have mentioned the (in)famous: > I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
GavinMcG 6y ago
Ironically, "when no additional words can be removed" is the same number of words as "remove words that don’t add necessary context" but communicates less by leaving out the concept of context. Changing "To be brief on the sentence-level" to "To write brief sentences" then leaving the rest would have been better.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
darkerside 6y ago
People aren't machines. We don't take an input and process it completely the first time. Human functions are not idempotent because we are stateful to the extreme, and when we hear the same message, we process it a different way the second time. Repetition is a tool. Repeating yourself is useful. When I was younger, I thought it was good to be brief, succinct, and concise (and for some purposes, it is). But with most audiences, repeating yourself several times, as I have done here, is your best chance at getting your message to actually hit home. People need to understand and process your idea from different angles and perspectives, and if you aren't able or willing to take efforts to make yourself understood, they will justifiably not make the effort to understand you either. Or, as I could have said more succinctly, there is value in repeating an important message in different but overlapping ways.
- taphangum 6y ago
  Very well put. To add to this, the onus is really on the writer to help the reader understand. Repetition is one of the best tools for this. If your reader doesn't get it, they blame you. So its wise to use all of the tools at your disposal.
paulpauper 6y ago
Agree. I found this guide full of fluff and filler.
gdubs 6y ago
A parent walks into a gallery, points at a Picasso, and says: “my five year old could do that.” The truth is, simplicity is hard. It’s about editing down to what’s essential. But not everything has to be Hemingway. Not everyone is a fan of that. So it’s also about knowing your audience, and finding your voice. I’ll take a crack at it: “Keep it simple. Aim for clarity. Know your audience. If a word doesn’t help move things along, get rid of it — otherwise you might put your readers to sleep.”
clubdorothe 6y ago
By watching the UChicago class[1] on " Writing Effectively ", this is exactly what happens to some HN readers: 1- You slow down - and read again 2- You don't understand 3- you get angry 4- You're done 5 - (optional) You write about it on HN because 3 and 4 [1] https://youtu.be/vtIzMaLkCaM?t=413 https://youtu.be/vtIzMaLkCaM?t=413
WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
Is yet better rewitten as: Skip fluff. It’s boring and obscures the point.

JacobSuperslav 6y ago

I work with SEO, CRO, UX and I can confirm that this style of writing - short sentences, tiny paragraphs - results in better outcomes: time on page is higher and bounce rate is lower.

jgrahamc 6y ago
I wonder if those metrics are like that because this style of writing has the reader thinking that the author has something important to say and has to spend a long time figuring out what it is because the sentences have been cut to the bone.
- JacobSuperslav 6y ago
  I honestly don't know, but the metrics rise on average, sending a positive signal to Google, which yields us higher rankings in Google, which equals more visitors. It's a constant battle between competitors -- finding out what the visitors want to read -- and how they want to read it.
Veen 6y ago
The title of the article is "Writing Well". It is not "Writing that Reduces Bounce Rates." These are not the same thing and marketing copy is not something every writer should seek to emulate.
- capableweb 6y ago
  The thing is, "Well" in "Writing Well" needs to be defined, because everyone sees it differently. For some, "Writing Well" is writing in a way that gives the reader a emotional reaction, like lots of fiction tends to aim for. For others, "Writing Well" is deconstructing concepts so people can understand complex ideas easier, like what most of technical writing aims to do. For yet others, "Writing Well" is writing in a way that visitors on a website stays for longer and reduces bounce rates, like content marketing tries to do. Like many things in life, what you understand "well" to mean, changes how you need to do your writing. Sometimes you need to switch how you see "well", depending on your goals. There is no right or wrong answer what "well" actually means.
- JacobSuperslav 6y ago
  This is Hacker News, so I assumed we're talking about websites/web apps, but you're right.

xenopticon 6y ago

Doesn't this depend a lot on _what_ and _where_ you are reading? I suspect people have completely different styles when reading e.g. a fiction book on a Kindle vs. a tutorial about deploying a Docker container. I wouldn't be surprised if generation/age played a factor too.

coffeefirst 6y ago
Absolutely. Academic writing has its own conventions that a lot of people have to unlearn when they leave that world, legal writing literally has its own grammar rules, etc. That said, the author strikes me as trying to teach something he isn't actually good at while pretending to be authorative. Most of this advice is standard stuff found in Strunk and White, Stephen King's "On Writing," and a hundred other solid books on this topic, but his style is disjointed, his examples aren't great, and then there's just the sheer silliness: > Why? The best writing is therapy that you publish for the world to learn from. No, it's really not.

cousin_it 6y ago

I think both versions are kinda lacking in rhythm. Here's my attempt, certainly imperfect too: If you make an effort to omit unnecessary words, your sentences will be easy for readers to understand without slowing down. It also reduces the chance that readers will get bored and quit. I used to uncritically accept the idea that concision was the single important thing about writing. The problem is, if you only ever write in short sentences, you'll neglect the skill of writing longer sentences that flow. And if you're writing anything longer than a tweet, you really need that skill! Having a natural mix of long and short sentences leads to a less "stuttery" feeling, and has a kind of hypnotic effect pulling the reader into your text and making them feel at home.

tartoran 6y ago
To avoid repeating the readers I would change to: “If you make an effort to omit unnecessary words, your sentences will be easy for readers to understand without slowing them down. It also reduces the chance that they will get bored and quit.”
dctoedt 6y ago
Or even: Try deleting words, lest your reader feel bogged down and give up — but brevity must serve clarity, so a few extra words might be worthwhile.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
nicoburns 6y ago
I was taught in high school that I should alternate long and short sentences in order to keep writing interesting. It seems like a pretty good rule of thumb.

gclv 6y ago

As a sibling has said, writing to maximise engagement is a different beast from writing “well”. I’m sure some “growth hacker” types would argue for defining “well” in a way that’s quantifiable, hence the confusion. I personally find that style very annoying. It’s especially popular on LinkedIn. When I notice that I’m reading some vertically-set essay, it’s my cue to stop scrolling and stay off LinkedIn for the next month.

ghaff 6y ago
I've had people try to convince me to use one of those apps that supposedly help you write for better "engagement." Invariably, they just don't get it when I say I'm not interested.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  I've been thinking about how useful raw engagement metrics actually are. Likes on your post or view on your video. These metrics count every reader and audience member equally, when they are far from equally relevant to you. By writing according to some common denominator you may trade a smaller high-quality audience off for a larger low-quality audience. For example if you want to promote your work, who cares if you get lots of views from people with small attention span and no deep interest? The goal is to put your thoughts out there into good hands (or minds). To foster collaboration, to get insightful feedback. (Or to make sales, but there again, consumers can have widely different behavior. Some have noted that pricing higher will get you a nicer user base.) Just one thoughtful reader may be worth a thousand inattentive bored scroller-clickers on LinkedIn. Because that one may write you an interesting message, which may lead to new opportunities, open up new communities for you. What do a thousand likes get you besides stroking your ego? I just don't see the value in that sort of mechanistic "karma farming".
  - ghaff 6y ago
    There's some value in raw numbers, especially at scale. It's reasonable for a company to care about how many views a product page, how to, or topic page gets. And it's a proxy for a lot of other things that are really hard to suss out. (Though you can measure things like how far people read/watch, time they spend, etc.) But for me personally, I mostly go by what I want to read and I don't really care if an SEO plug-in is telling me I should be writing at a sixth grade level--which is the level a lot of these tools work at. (And I'm often working with experienced editors who have a pretty good sense of what their audience/desired audience is looking for.) They're also not mostly ad-supported so there isn't a lot of incentive to go for pageviews for the sake of pageviews.

szszrk 6y ago

Your sentence is brief when no additional words can be removed. Being succinct is important because filler buries your talking points and bores readers into quitting. I find it harder to understand as well. I do get it but I see that a lot of my fellow non-native speakers will struggle with this kind of writing. Second sentence is way more complex then the whole original paragraph. "Succint", "filler", "buries", "bores into quitting" - whoah. Give me a breath, please! Is this an articatle on how to write good looking text, or easy to understand text? At first glance I though it was supposed to ilustrate the exact opposite of what it tries to ilustrate. The whole first page is composed of only bullet points and it requires a lot of focus and effort to go through. I had no urge to click to the next page after that introduction. Is it grandiose (had to google that), or do they treat me like an idiot? Bizarre. It's like reading a list of quotes from famous people. If you would read it aloud after 3 or 4 of these I'm done. Next ones could be a dinner recipe - I might not notice. When I write to much and too fast (like now I am, sorry!) I like to remind myself how authors write on sites for beginners in a particular language [0][1]. It's clean and doesn't treat me like an idiot. [0] https://www.nachrichtenleicht.de/ https://www.nachrichtenleicht.de/ [1] https://www.sr.de/ https://www.sr.de/

PlugTunin 6y ago
Is this an articatle on how to write good looking text, or easy to understand text? good question

appleflaxen 6y ago

Thanks for sharing your opinion. I found myself strongly agreeing with the post, and it's really helpful to get a counter-perspective.

nobody9999 6y ago

William Safire's Rules for Writers: Remember to never split an infinitive. The passive voice should never be used. Do not put statements in the negative form. Verbs have to agree with their subjects. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be by rereading and editing. ========= The above, plus Strunk & White[0], should be enough for most folks IMNSHO. [0] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37134 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37134

ramblerman 6y ago
> Proofread carefully to see if you words out. That omission almost seems too perfect
- GavinMcG 6y ago
  That's the point. Each line violates the rule it states.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- nobody9999 6y ago
  >That omission almost seems too perfect It is perfect -- because William Safire was a wonderful writer[0]. I didn't care much for his politics, but that man could write! [0] https://www.nytimes.com/by/william-safire https://www.nytimes.com/by/william-safire
goto11 6y ago
I disagree with two of Safires points: There is nothing wrong with splitting an infinitive. Shakespeare does it and Star Trek does it. Passive voice is fine. Sure it can be used to make the text impersonal and hide responsibility. But is can also be used to make the text clearer and to emphasize what is important. Use it as appropriate.
- 6y ago

jfk13 6y ago

Wouldn't it be simpler to just say something like: > Keep sentences brief; unnecessary filler obscures your point and bores the reader. "Brevity is the soul of wit."

bonoboTP 6y ago
There are different kinds of long windedness. One kind, that people most think about, is rambling, bringing up unimportant points, repeating something you've already said etc. The other kind is more on the wordsmithing level of formulating the same thing in fewer words by switching out longer, less dense grammatical structures with snappier ones. It's very much like refactoring code. You can do it on a higher level by cutting out entire chunks of code that don't really need to be done, or on a low level by being familiar with the language's helpful syntactic sugars, best practices, to make the meaning clear and less obscured by boilerplate and "syntactic chores". I noticed the effectiveness of low-level refactoring in prose when I first started writing academic papers. Since page limits are strict, you need to pay attention to eliminate any words that aren't necessary and are thin on semantics. This doesn't mean writing in staccato. But when you spot a paragraph where a single word spills over to an extra line, it requires a specific learnable skill to rewrite a sentence or two to eliminate the extra line. You can often tell how much someone wordsmithed around on a paper by seeing how long the last line of each paragraph is. Of course sometimes gains are on the high level, I'm not saying that good writing is just about messing with the low level of the actual words and the grammar. Similarly to the debate whether premature optimization is the root of all evil, it's about a balance in writing too. First you must have clear thoughts on what to say and what you can leave out. But at the end, when things have settled, it is worth to go over it once again at specific places and low-level edit things to be snappier, counting words, letters and millimeters on the paper.
- jfk13 6y ago
  On the topic of brevity vs. long-windedness, I'm surprised nobody seems to have mentioned the (in)famous: > I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

GavinMcG 6y ago

Ironically, "when no additional words can be removed" is the same number of words as "remove words that don’t add necessary context" but communicates less by leaving out the concept of context. Changing "To be brief on the sentence-level" to "To write brief sentences" then leaving the rest would have been better.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

darkerside 6y ago

People aren't machines. We don't take an input and process it completely the first time. Human functions are not idempotent because we are stateful to the extreme, and when we hear the same message, we process it a different way the second time. Repetition is a tool. Repeating yourself is useful. When I was younger, I thought it was good to be brief, succinct, and concise (and for some purposes, it is). But with most audiences, repeating yourself several times, as I have done here, is your best chance at getting your message to actually hit home. People need to understand and process your idea from different angles and perspectives, and if you aren't able or willing to take efforts to make yourself understood, they will justifiably not make the effort to understand you either. Or, as I could have said more succinctly, there is value in repeating an important message in different but overlapping ways.

taphangum 6y ago
Very well put. To add to this, the onus is really on the writer to help the reader understand. Repetition is one of the best tools for this. If your reader doesn't get it, they blame you. So its wise to use all of the tools at your disposal.

paulpauper 6y ago

Agree. I found this guide full of fluff and filler.

gdubs 6y ago

A parent walks into a gallery, points at a Picasso, and says: “my five year old could do that.” The truth is, simplicity is hard. It’s about editing down to what’s essential. But not everything has to be Hemingway. Not everyone is a fan of that. So it’s also about knowing your audience, and finding your voice. I’ll take a crack at it: “Keep it simple. Aim for clarity. Know your audience. If a word doesn’t help move things along, get rid of it — otherwise you might put your readers to sleep.”

clubdorothe 6y ago

By watching the UChicago class[1] on " Writing Effectively ", this is exactly what happens to some HN readers: 1- You slow down - and read again 2- You don't understand 3- you get angry 4- You're done 5 - (optional) You write about it on HN because 3 and 4 [1] https://youtu.be/vtIzMaLkCaM?t=413 https://youtu.be/vtIzMaLkCaM?t=413

WesolyKubeczek 6y ago

Is yet better rewitten as: Skip fluff. It’s boring and obscures the point.