4 ms·
As someone with this very style (my own blog posts often rise into the 5k word range) and also from a technical background, I can at least explain my motivation
by stego-tech 1y ago
As someone with this very style (my own blog posts often rise into the 5k word range) and also from a technical background, I can at least explain my motivations for length: absolute domination of the argument.
In professional settings, brevity is often mistaken for inexperience or a weak position. As the thinking goes, a competent engineer should be able to defend every position they take like a PhD candidate defending their dissertation. At the same time, however, excess verbosity is viewed as distinctly “cold” and “engineer” in tone, and frowned upon by non-technical folks in my experience; they wanted an answer, not an explainer.
The problem is that each of us have the data points of what succeeds in convincing others: the longer argument, every single time. Thus we use it in our own writing because we want to convince the imagined reader (as well as ourselves) that our position is correct, or at the very least, sound. In doing so we write lengthy posts, while often doing research to validate our positions with charts, screenshots, Wikipedia articles, news sources, etc. It’s as much about convincing ourselves as it is other readers, hence why we go for longer posts based on real world experiences.
One plot twist subjective to me: my lengthy posts are also about quelling my brain, in a very real sense. It is the reader, and if I do not get everything out of my head about that topic and onto “paper”, it will continue to dwell and gnaw on the missed points in perpetuity. Thus, 5k posts about things like the inefficiency of hate in Capital or a Systems Analysis of American Hegemony, just so I can have peace and quiet in my own head by getting it completely out of said head.
- collinmcnulty 1y agoAs someone who similarly writes to think, I found a lot of insight from this video [0] from the University of Chicago. Long story appropriately short, he recommends writing something twice: once for yourself and once for the reader. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM
- stego-tech 1y agoThat approach has helped me immensely in my communications, but less so for blog posts. I think it’s because I’ve fully internalized writing in my downtime as writing for myself first, and I just like longer, in-depth reads as a personal preference.
- mannykannot 1y agoI don't recall if this is covered in the video, but here are two pitfalls I have noticed from my own attempts: 1) If I am considering possible objections to my position, I have to be very clear which points I am raising only for the sake of argument, and which are the ones I am actually advocating for, or else it will appear confused or self-contradictory. A related issue is to preempt possible objections to the point where the reader might lose track of the main issue. 2) After making several passes to hone my position, it can seem so obvious to me that what I write for the reader is too terse for anyone who is approaching the issue for the first time.
- 542354234235 1y agoAlso, the internet in particular has a tendency to go out of its way to interpret things in the least charitable way possible. If there is a way to take anything you said negatively, or hyper literally, or any other way to misinterpret your intention, it will. So you tend to assume a bad-faith reading and preemptively explain/respond to possible nitpicks.