3 ms·
A writing tip I learned at community college: "get to the point".
by V-2 5y ago
A writing tip I learned at community college: "get to the point".
- dang 5y ago"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- V-2 5y agoSuccint doesn't mean shallow.
- dang 5y agoYes, but the comment was a shallow dismissal. It arguably also broke this guideline too: "Don't be snarky."
- antonvs 5y agoIt's a deceptively deep dismissal. Please think before posting comments like this.
- dang 5y agoI did; my thinking was that it was a snarky dig at the author by knocking "Oxford" down to "community college" and making the cliché internet objection to longer articles ("get to the point"). In other words: an obvious status move, the cheapest fault-finding that exists, and literally nothing else. It considers none of the actual content, and to the extent it says anything, what it says is false—there's no need for articles to "get to the point"; it all depends on what kind of article it is. All that seemed not only shallow and dismissive, but a textbook specimen of the genre; hence I posted the above. What's your thinking?
- antonvs 5y agoThe Oxford/community college point is a valid one, because it points out the emptiness of the clickbaity "learned at Oxford" in the OP title. The "cliché internet objection to longer articles" can be valid in some cases. This is one of them. Plenty of other comments in this thread have pointed out the inherently blogspammy nature of the OP. It's a long, rambling piece with a clickbait title that wraps a tiny nugget of advice that may in any case be of limited applicability. I'm a huge fan of long-form writing, like many of the articles one can find in e.g. The New Yorker, The Paris Review, etc. If this had been an article like that, then a snarky but biting dismissal might have been out of line. But the only thing the OP article has in common with those articles are its aspirations, which it failed to deliver on. Responding to the form of a critical comment without considering the context is blind application of rules that doesn't help maintain the level of dialog. If we really wanted to apply effective moderation here, it should be to the OP article.
- dang 5y agoYou've done a better job of defending it than I assumed possible! I still don't think you're reckoning with the cheapness of the snark.