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Another writing tip, which is the antithesis of today's recipe blogging culture to which this post belongs. - If I can't find the most important part of your w
by LegitShady 5y ago
Another writing tip, which is the antithesis of today's recipe blogging culture to which this post belongs.
- If I can't find the most important part of your writing in 3 seconds, I've already moved on.
Take the linked article - I clicked on it for a writing tip. In the first paragraph they suddenly tell me it's not about a writing tip, it's 'weaving together three things'.
Now I scan the article quickly looking for the writing tip, because I don't care about the history of the writing tip before I've evaluated if it's any good.
3 seconds are up, and my patience is gone, and while the author is very interested in their history of writing tutorials at oxford, literally nobody else is.
I'll only care about it if I think the writing tip is interesting, but I can't find the writing tip because it's organized like a recipe blog - you click for a recipe, and they hide the recipe somewhere on the page. At least with recipes you can recognize the format of the recipe down the page somewhere, making scanning easier. With this I can't even do that.
So here's the writing tip for the author - don't hook someone in promising a writing tip, and then hide that writing tip. If it's enough of a tip to get me interested in your story, I'll read it. If it's not, then you just clickbaited me and nothing you write matters.
I classify this as some sort of weird ultra snobbery ('I learned this at oxford') clickbait ('here's a writing tip I'm going to hide in a diary entry'). Promise me a writing tip, give me the writing tip, or lose my interest forever (because now I classify you as recipe blog I won't click on it again).
- bryanrasmussen 5y agothat was a pretty long comment, with a lot of points to follow.
- LegitShady 5y agobut you can find the main point in 3 seconds - it's in the second line, on it's own, with a symbol beside it. Then I get into the story. You can choose to follow along or not afterward - you've gotten the most important point right away.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoOk, that symbol though - the > is generally used as a quote symbol in HN, so of course I was confused as to what was being quoted. on edit: by quote symbol I mean this is the point that someone else in the parent comment or the article made that I am going to respond to in my following bit of text.
- LegitShady 5y agoI think it's actually a carry over from reddit, where it activates the quote, while here on hacker news it does nothing. It's just a symbol.
- dragonwriter 5y agoIt’s a carryover from long established internet (plaintext email, Usenet, etc.) convention, which is where reddit (and lots of other forums) got it, too.
- LegitShady 5y agomost people on the internet have never used plain text email, or usenet. A fair chunk of them have used reddit, where it actually does something. So I guess it's just not that important to me, overall, to use a convention that few people have ever used. If HN had a basic quote function it wouldn't matter.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- havelhovel 5y ago> So I guess it's just not that important to me, overall, to use a convention that few people have ever used. My favorite writing tip is knowing one’s audience. (:
- 5y ago
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago>>> If I can't find the most important part of your writing in 3 seconds, I've already moved on. You should try to to qualify that with the kind of writing you mean, because taken literally, that's a weird way to read anything. For instance, what is "the most important part" in War and Peace, or Song of Ice and Fire, that the reader should be able to find in 3 seconds?
- LegitShady 5y agoNo, I shouldn't. I was clearly talking about blog posts and similar articles. It wasn't a criticism of dostoyevsky, either. smh