
Bad Habits Creeping into Your Writing? - blegh
https://lithub.com/are-these-bad-habits-creeping-into-your-writing/
======
apo
My own pet peeve in non-fiction, particularly the kind that appears on blogs:
the excruciating warmup before the author finally gets to the point of the
post.

I know why this happens. When you sit down to write, you don't know what
exactly you're going to say. You may even be anxious about it. Then, an idea
sparks your imagination and you start writing stuff. The warmup that comes out
initially gets you on track. Nothing wrong with that.

The harm is keeping that crap in the post. Delete it! If I don't understand
what I'm about to read in the first paragraph, I'm probably done.

Something else I don't like: writers who use too many words. The telltale sign
of a first draft is the vast quantity of words (and even entire sentences)
that don't need to be there.

A single edit with the goal of ruthlessly eliminating every unnecessary word
works wonders for any first draft.

Edit: On the topic of fiction, the author gives a beautiful example from the
Wizard of Oz:

> When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothin
> but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the
> broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all
> directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little
> cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had
> burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be
> seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the
> paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray
> as everything else. [continues]

I haven't read the book but this passage alone makes me want to.

~~~
nn3
It is even worse in internet recipes. The authors tend to go on and on about
their feelings, family and personal stories before finally getting to the
point how to actually cook the dish. I usually have to skip several
paragraphs.

~~~
kaycebasques
I always assumed that this is an SEO practice?

~~~
dspillett
I'm not sure how a section of information that is often largely irrelevant to
the recipe (despite mentioning a few key terms) is going to be a valuable SEO
practise.

I assume people are trying to be the next online cooking personality who gets
to publish a book. I've seen a couple in shops with pictures of YouTube recipe
demonstration people on the cover.

Also, more text is more "content" to mix adverts into.

~~~
zimpenfish
> I assume people are trying to be the next online cooking personality who
> gets to publish a book.

I just assume that they associate recipes and foods with times and places and
people (generally happily) and it's akin to "do you remember that time mother
cooked weasel?" kind of conversations you'd have with people, except on a
blog.

~~~
dspillett
That it probably the case for those that are put together more as a blog for
friends and family to peruse.

But a lot of the sites I've seen don't feel that way. They feel like they are
desperately _trying_ to feel that way though (the old "sincerity is key: once
you can fake it you win" skit).

------
Animats
From the article:

 _Many writers rely more heavily on pronouns than I’d suggest is useful. For
me this sort of thing comes under the heading Remember that Writing Is Not
Speaking. When we talk, we can usually make ourselves understood even amid a
flood of vague “he”s and “she”s. On the page, too many pronouns are apt to be
confounding. I’d strongly suggest to the point of insistence that you avoid
referring to two people by the same pronoun over the course of a single
sentence; to be frank, I’d suggest that you avoid it over the course of a
single paragraph. (I know a few authors of same-sex romance novels who are
regularly driven to tears by this sort of thing.)_

Tightened up:

 _Pronouns can be overused. Writing is not speaking. When we talk, we can
understand who 's who amid a flood of "he"s and "she"s. On the page, that's
confusing. Best to avoid referring to two people by the same pronoun in the
same sentence. (Same-sex romance novelists struggle with this.)_

Who, besides the guy himself, says this guy is the "Internet's copy editor in
chief"?

~~~
ABCLAW
I prefer the author's version.

What you have gained in brevity, you have lost many times over in tone, pace
and depth.

The author's repetitions are not errors - they highlight his insistence.
Additionally, despite ample pronoun use, his text is clear and illustrative of
his point.

~~~
scott_s
Same. The edited version loses the author's voice - which is what good editing
is _not_ supposed to. And the aside about same-sex romance authors goes from a
personal anecdote to a general statement. Personal anecdotes are more
entertaining.

------
vharuck
An infrequent part of my job is writing and editing public reports about data.
Not even guessing as to causal factors or future impacts, just stating the
data in English.

I wish more people would accept that writing is not speaking. Beyond pronouns,
when this is good advice:

\- Don't use acronyms for short names or phrases. "Department of Motor
Vehicles" is a mouthful, but not much more of an eyeful than "DMV" after
seeing it twice. (Consider using the acronym if the amount of space filled
with text looks daunting).

\- It's okay to be repetitive. In fact, it's good to repetitively present
data. The pinnacles of this is the table, but narrative text also works.

~~~
stordoff
> Don't use acronyms for short names or phrases. "Department of Motor
> Vehicles" is a mouthful, but not much more of an eyeful than "DMV" after
> seeing it twice.

I find this much harder to scan than the acronym, especially when the acronym
is common.

------
coat
There should be a version of this for hacker news comments and tech blog
posts. Every time I see the phrase 'that said' or 'that being said' I
involuntarily cringe.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=...](https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=%22that%20being%20said%22)

~~~
Someone1234
Can you explain why? The phase allows you, after having made a point, to
invert that point then suggest an alternative explanation or perspective.

I read a few of the posts in the search results, and "That being said" felt
natural in many cases to join sometimes contradictory positions or different
degrees of the same position together into one fluid thought.

Someone can cringe at anyone. Without offering critique, insight, or
alternative it feels hollow though.

~~~
coat
I don't really have a good explanation other than we already have words like
'However' and 'But'. It also seems redundant, maybe just start typing your
contradictory position without the need for a connecting phrase?

That being said, it may just be me who is annoyed by the phrase. I think it
just gets used a lot and I can't help but notice for some reason. I think I've
associated the phrase with strawman arguments and my hollow cringe is unfair
judgement.

~~~
Dylan16807
> I don't really have a good explanation other than we already have words like
> 'However' and 'But'.

'But' is very generic and 'However' is longer than 'that said'.

> It also seems redundant, maybe just start typing your contradictory position
> without the need for a connecting phrase?

That makes it much more difficult to keep the topic flowing, and it can be
very confusing if you jump to an almost-contradiction without warning the
reader that it's time to do some contrasting and fine-tuning.

~~~
EForEndeavour
> 'However' is longer than 'that said'.

We're both nitpicking at this point: "however" is _shorter_ than "that said"
according to two out of three relevant metrics:

"however": _1 word_ , 3 syllables, _7 characters_

"that said": 2 words, _2 syllables_ , 9 characters

 _That said_ , it's a waste of time to worry about the difference anyway. Keep
in mind that we aren't minifying JS or hand-optimizing processor code. When it
comes to natural-language communication between humans, _not_ every byte
matters.

Use the words that sound natural to you for your intended audience. Weigh
feedback from trusted coworkers and members of that audience.

------
zimpenfish
> • How often do you stare into the middle distance? Me neither.

All the time - probably a good 20% of my work days are spent starting into the
middle distance thinking.

------
fanpuns
It a my first time to see lithub.com. I was hoping it would be like Github for
writers, but was disappointed.

Does anyone know if such a thing exists?

~~~
kleer001
There's
[https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/)

and

[https://english.stackexchange.com/](https://english.stackexchange.com/)

I'm not entirely sure what would be on a literature GitHub.

~~~
fanpuns
When I was first exposed to Medium (which was before I started coding), the
coolaborative notes and highlights really felt like what I would want a
literature github to be.

Just as a thought experiment, it's interesting that I think nothing of forking
and maintaining a codebase for personal use, but I can't imagine participating
in the writing of stories in the same way. Literature seems to maintain the
primacy of the 'maintainer', but if I think about the evolution of
storytelling generally, this doesn't seem to have always been the case

------
derekmcloughlin
“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”

\-- William Faulkner

[https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Kill%20your%...](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Kill%20your%20darlings)

------
ddxxdd
>"This may be a particular peeve of mine and no one else’s, but I note it,
because it’s my book: Name-dropping, for no better reason than to show off,
under-appreciated novels, obscure foreign films, or cherished indie bands by
having one’s characters irrelevantly reading or watching or listening to them
is massively sore-thumbish. A novel is not a blog post about Your Favorite
Things.[5] If you must do this sort of thing—and, seriously, must
you?—contextualize heavily."

 _Laughs in Ready Player One_ :
[https://i.imgur.com/oJXgNRQ.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/oJXgNRQ.jpg)

~~~
crooked-v
Even worse is the dissonance that comes when you consider that the author is
treating this like a celebration of pop-culture that he loves, while in-
universe this is the result of incredibly poor and culturally oppressed people
desperately memorizing a dead guy's favorite stuff to try and get all the
wealth he stumbled into and then hoarded until his death.

------
billfruit
A good guide on writing, that is on organization the presentation of ideas and
structuring written arguments (not a book on usage and style) is Robert Penn
Warren and Cleanth Brookes: 'Modern Rhetoric'.

------
luord
In another piece of writing advise I read, the author said not to use physical
descriptors in place of names (such as "the redhead") because it reduced the
character to a single aspect.

Also I can't tell what's wrong with Jackson's passage: I assume it has
something to do with Graves/gravely, but I don't know why it's wrong.

All in all, writing code seems much easier for me.

------
chadcmulligan
As a techie I write good, but I always feel woefully inadequate when reading
the nuances that real writers consider.

~~~
jrochkind1
I don't know the best way to tell you that your fly is down, but... 'well'.
You write well.

~~~
neonate
I think he wrote that ironically.

------
ben509
It's a bit rich to complain about bad writing in Yet Another Listicle.

