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There’s an idea in your head. You produce some text with your fingers. I consume that text with my eyeballs. Some idea forms in my head. Phrased like thi
by fwlr 4y ago
There’s an idea in your head.
You produce some text with your fingers.
I consume that text with my eyeballs.
Some idea forms in my head.
Phrased like this, your aim is obviously that the idea in my head closely resembles the idea in your head. Don’t get distracted by trying to make your text more closely resemble the idea in your head; your text is just a tool to get past my eyeballs and into my brain.
The best advice I have for improving that resemblance is this: Re-read your writing looking for other possible ideas that could be formed, and then edit it such that it is incompatible with as many of the other ideas as possible. You may need to put it down and come back later with fresh eyes in order to see those other possible ideas.
This sounds like the cliche advice of “re-read and edit, put it down and come back with fresh eyes“ - because it IS that cliche, expanded into the most specific and effective form of itself that I know. Unfortunately, the cliche by itself isn’t as helpful, since there are many other ways to expand it. You could re-read, but looking to see how closely it resembles the idea in your head (a common mistake, I cautioned against it above). You could edit, but such that it has fewer words (aesthetically pleasing for sure, but it risks sacrificing that all-important ‘inter-brain idea-resemblance’). You could come back with fresh eyes thinking the goal is to rediscover and refine the idea that’s already in your head (a good way to think, but this is more precisely called ‘journaling’ and it doesn’t have much to do with writing to communicate.)
Case in point: it was only upon re-reading my comment and thinking ‘damn, that last paragraph is really long, can I fix that?’ that I realized the entire last paragraph is literally me being worried that you’ll see “re-read … edit … come back with fresh eyes” and then the idea that ends up in your head will just be whatever you usually interpret the cliche to mean, instead of the very specific process I have in mind! I should also add a concrete example, those are usually very effective. I suspect concrete examples are helpful precisely because they are derived from your idea and not from your text description of the idea: there’s a cloud of possible ideas compatible with the text you wrote, and there’s another cloud of possible ideas compatible with the examples you give, and the intersection of those two is quite specific.
- saurik 4y agoI absolutely agree with this, and will add that one thing I do is have other people read it and see what they think and if there is any confusion at all I don't ever chalk it up to the reader or just try to get them to understand: I try to edit my article to prevent that mistake from ever having been conceived of; too many people are just like "engh: that's just one opinion and a bunch of other people got it" without realizing how their test readership likely has a sampling bias or that 1/10 is actually really bad.
- fwlr 4y agoI do this too and it’s very helpful. Just be aware that anything the reader tells you is necessarily going though another round of brain->text->eyeballs->brain. Read their response carefully, lest your brain smudge their words enough to simply pattern-match it back to your original idea.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y agoI will forewarn against following this advice blindly however, because it heavily relies on your audience. Any mature writer should on some level conceive of a precise population of consumers for their work and write to that population, and indeed say “eugh that’s an irrelevant opinion” to people outside of their audience. This is also referred to as having authorial intent or voice. Writing a technical analysis of a very strange bug doesn’t necessarily need to highlight that this isn’t entomology!
- saurik 4y agoRelatedly, soon after I wrote that comment, I thought "I wonder if someone is going to think I meant random people whom weren't even in my audience, as opposed to only people I wanted to read my article in the first place", but then I was driving and it was just a comment and I was like "engh"... the next day, I come back to your comment feeling a need to correct me, and so I should have probably pulled over because these feelings really aren't something to ignore.
- smcin 4y agoThat's extremely true, but for writing non-fiction. For writing fiction, it's perfectly possible to have a tradeoff writing to be evocative vs being clear and precise. Tolkien and Fleming spring to mind.
- fwlr 4y agoAgreed, a fiction writer trying too hard to put a specific idea in my head all the time is going to annoy me. Not all fiction all the time, though - Sanderson’s novels appeal to me in part because he is very specific about how his magic system works, while being more free about other elements. And not all non-fiction all the time, either - I love a good evocative phrase alongside all the specifics, it gives me a feeling to go along with the understanding. The aim of fiction, then, is not to achieve perfect idea-resemblance, but rather to produce the most beautiful or engaging ideas in the reader’s brain that one can, without caring too much how closely that idea resembles the author’s own. Man, evocative is a really good word. Perhaps we can talk about “communicative writing” “evocative writing” instead of non-fiction and fiction respectively, so we’re not bogged down with genre categories or factual accuracy.
- smcin 4y agoI used to mentally stick on writers like Tolkien, Fleming, Frank Herbert, Philip K Dick, because I had to reread their more dense passages multiple times, and even then it was still unclear to me what specifically they were describing, but eventually I figured their intent was more to evoke whatever associations each individual reader made, than to clearly communicate the same thing. So then I decided that some fiction should be read differently, more casually and without an obsession with clarity, unlike non-fiction or technical stuff.
- smcin 4y agoActually, it's William Gibson's cyberpunk writing which turns up the dial on evocative-over-coherent to 11. It's a kaleidoscope of words seeking subjective associations in each reader's mind. There was one completely impenetrable section (Mona Lisa Overdrive, maybe?) the paragraph that contains "the armature of his pleasure" or something. Some random Gibson quotes: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/9226.William_Gibson https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/9226.William_Gibson
- buffet_overflow 4y agoI do this often, namely asking myself "is there any way this could be misread or come across as ambiguous?" Unfortunately that also trains my brain to look for ambiguity in text, which leaves me frustrated when I don't see the same amount of specificity around me.
- cozos 4y agoAt my programming job I find that when I communicate, my sentences are too long and have too much detail to the point where people probably skim over what I write and don't really read it. Looking at other coworkers who seem to be effective communicators, they seem to be more economical with their words with the use of jargon (in a good way) that encapsulates more complex ideas into a word or term. For example, I would write "when the thing we use is shared by many other things" and the shorter term would be "multi-tenant". When "one of the things uses too many resources and disrupts the other things in the shared environment" the shorter term is "noisy neighbors problem". So I find that finding the right word or jargon is really helpful for making writing easy to read.
- isaachawley 4y agoI like to imagine an evil genie is reading the text with intent to misunderstand. (This is also my coding process.)