4 ms·
For pete sake, don't break up the flow and over-complicate your very first sentence with irrelevant asides like this: > A friend and I were talking about our f
by pimlottc 3y ago
For pete sake, don't break up the flow and over-complicate your very first sentence with irrelevant asides like this:
> A friend and I were talking about our families today when I realized that my grandmother (this grandmother) became a grandma (not my grandma) at 45.
I got confused and distracted trying to solve the riddle of why his "grandmother" was not his "grandma" [0] when it had nothing to do with the point he was trying to make. And the "this grandmother" parenthetical could have just been a subtle inline link.
> A friend and I were talking about our families today when I realized that _my_grandmother_ became a grandma at 45.
Much clearer!
0: I think he meant that his grandmother's first grandchild, who born when she was 45, was someone other than the author, so technically she wasn't /his/ grandma at that moment because he didn't actually exist yet.
- rgovostes 3y ago[flagged]
- em-bee 3y agoi would have said it like this: my grandmother became a grandma to my cousin at 45
- JackeJR 3y agoAppend to that "x years before I was born"
- enobrev 3y agoI no longer read anything in parentheses for this exact reason. It seems people tend to write their "live-edits" and "related thoughts" in parentheses rather than spending a moment to figure out what they want to say and writing it clearly. I've found skipping anything within parentheses tends to improve my understanding while reading.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ironmanszombie 3y agoReally? You don't read anything in parentheses? I think that would be harder to do (I'm joking, don't take it seriously) than actually reading the parenthetical information.
- codetrotter 3y ago> I think that would be harder to do than actually reading the parenthetical information. You must be joking, right?
- thiht 3y agoThis is my take on writing as well, I consider everything in parentheses as optional. If I want to write something in parentheses, I try to reconsider: either drop it, or write it without parentheses.
- stevage 3y agoI would have been more distracted wondering where the link went. I kind of enjoyed the riddle. I'd just move the parenthetical to a separate sentence, or leave it out.
- alexey-salmin 3y agoHow is this unclear from what he wrote?
- tqi 3y agoFor a substack called "memoirs & rambles", I think writing in a style that conveys a bit of the writer's own personality is fine, even if it comes at the expense of clarity. Not everything has to be an Argument Paper.
- sundalia 3y agoNot everything has to be clear and to the point. The sentence's murkiness adds emotion to the text. I'm not a native speaker (just like the writer isn't) and maybe that's why we're not so bothered. But this comment is exactly what I expected from HN.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]