
Write less - bgnm2000
http://getnashty.com/write-less
======
alexanderRohde
The ironic thing in this instance is that in a way the author is clearly
negating his point by needing to show the crossed-out text. Imagine you had
followed the link, and the only text was "Fewer words create a more powerful
message."

We would likely feel cheated at some level, like "That's it? How did one
sentence get a whole HN link?" In a way we're conditioned to expect a bunch of
garbage filler that we merely skim, and because that's what's in demand right
now it's what authors are incentivized to provide.

~~~
echohack
The reality is that you need BOTH.

This is how modern news articles are written:
[http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/24/4698382/second-lifes-
stran...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/24/4698382/second-lifes-strange-
second-life)

Some people will skim and get the information. Some people will read and get
entertainment. Some people want the details, because they need a deeper
understanding. Some people want a high level overview, because they already
understand things and just want the information.

See also: Richard Feynman's books on physics.

~~~
_mulder_
A good example to prove the OP.

Your Second Life article probably has some interesting things to say, I
wouldn't know, I didn't read it. Instead I clicked the link, scrolled and
scrolled and before I'd even got to the bottom I'd calculated it would take me
about half an hour of my life to read the thing.

I don't want to invest half an hour of my life in learning about someone's
blow-by-blow account of their Second Life experience (I'd question anybody who
does and point them to one of the numerous HN articles on
procrastination/wasted time). An article that long devoted only to Second Life
(condescension aside, there really are more important things, honestly) seems
pretentious and serving the authors Ego more than the readers curiosity.

Richard Feynman however, the secrets of the universe and world around us, yes,
I would like to learn more about that.

------
tmoertel
When writing about technical subjects, however, you often need redundancy.
People sometimes misunderstand concepts. When they do, the only thing that
will alert them to their error is the second explanation crashing into the
first.

~~~
edw519
I am going to tell you about the 3 phases of technical writing.

You tell them what you are going to tell them. You tell them. You tell them
what you just told them.

I just told you about the 3 phases of technical writing.

~~~
nalbyuites
I recently came to appreciate this as a novice programmer learning Lisp. After
working through the initial chapters of 'Practical Common Lisp' and 'Land of
Lisp', I settled on DS Touretzky's 'Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to
Symbolic Computation'.

The pace is very comforting for a beginner and the reiterations are meticulous
in detail and yet concise. For any beginner, the joy and confidence from being
able to grok simple concepts and finishing all exercises provides the impetus
to move on to tomes like SICP, 'On Lisp' and 'Let Over Lambda'. I would highly
recommend technical authors to study the prose and content layout in this
book.

------
mekoka
Comprehension is what saves readers time. Write as much as it's needed for
your readers to understand.

If I opened a page and fell on author's last one-liner, I'd be inclined to
dispute the statement. It's void of context and arguments and we can surely
find countless examples to contradict the notion.

Fewer doesn't mean simpler. Maths or programming expressions can be terse, yet
so packed full of information that they take hours to decipher. We can find
the equivalent in literature.

Sometimes to get your point across fast you have to use longer, yet more
accessible sentences. To save readers' time, just write simpler, not shorter.

~~~
unmei
Bingo.

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." \- Einstein

------
crazygringo
Counterpoint (specifically in the field of advertising), titled "Do long copy
ads work? Let’s ask some of the greatest names in advertising history" [1]

Answer at the end: "Every one of the authors I have quoted is a giant in the
field of advertising... And they all agree about the [positive] effectiveness
of long copy ads."

[1] [http://www.realityassociates.com/Articles/Art-
LongCopy.htm](http://www.realityassociates.com/Articles/Art-LongCopy.htm)

------
programminggeek
Brevity is good for some things.

A long description full of descriptive adjectives is absolutely critical for
certain types of writing that require you to literally paint a picture of
scenery, emotion, and dialogue.

Know what you're writing.

~~~
mbrock
Brevity isn't always a time-saver in technical writing, either. Sometimes it's
confusing and ambiguous.

Just consider that your words are real things that other people are going to
encounter. Those people are often likely to be stressed, confused, or even
angry – especially if you're making a web page.

Is your user someone who has a problem that they want to solve right now? Then
be as clear as you possibly can. Don't try to be funny or clever. Don't even
try to be exceptionally brief!

------
danso
The OP has the right mindset but the advice is not very helpful. It's not just
overall number of words, but _which_ words you remove. In general, you should
cut adjectives.

As C.S. Lewis notes: [http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/04/c-s-lewis-on-
writing.ht...](http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/04/c-s-lewis-on-writing.html)

> _In writing. Don 't use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to
> feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a
> thing was "terrible," describe it so that we'll be terrified. Don't say it
> was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description.
> You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are
> only like saying to your readers, "Please will you do my job for me."_

Here's some advice from Woodrow Wilson that should strike a note with
programmers who write modular code:

[http://books.google.com/books?id=zjcUAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA268&dq=%2...](http://books.google.com/books?id=zjcUAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA268&dq=%22when+you+frame+a+sentence%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=cuMsUtCkNZGq4AOyv4DoBw&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22when%20you%20frame%20a%20sentence%22&f=false)

> _The best teacher I ever had used to say to me, “When you frame a sentence
> don’t do it as if you were loading a shotgun but as if you were loading a
> rifle. Don’t fire in such a way and with such a load that while you hit the
> thing you aim at, you will hit a lot of things in the neighborhood besides;
> but shoot with a single bullet and hit that one thing alone.”_

~~~
tommorris
Adjectives can be very useful. Let's take delightful.

Imagine one is writing a ’50 Shades’-style S&M story.

 _He ran through the previous night 's activities. There was the brutal
whipping, followed by a caning. He was forced to drink the urine of a dog, and
then she stretched his arms out in agonising pain._

 _" That sounds brutal," Melanie said with her eyelids agape. She had never
understood the appeal of kinky sex._

 _" No, it was delightful really," he said with a big, perverse grin on his
face._

Lewis' suggested rule against adjectives in writing is fine, but sometimes
they are very useful for contrast or in dialogue.

The adjectives you use can build up the character of a person, and can form
part of their personal idiolect.

Lewis' advice is fine and good, but one ought not to extrapolate from a rule
against applying adjectives lazily in place of actual description to a rule
against using adjectives at all.

------
Ari_Rahikkala
> Fewer words, create a more powerful message.

Fewer commas, create a sentence that makes more sense.

~~~
erroneousfunk
Also needs a string.replace("less", "fewer") in v1

~~~
jonny_eh
You're nitpicking the grammar in a crossed out paragraph?

------
mattjaynes
For my recent technical book, I spent 3 weeks writing over 200 pages and then
3 weeks editing to get the book down to under 80 pages.

It's funny because I then had several complaints (from non-buyers
particularly) that the book cost too much for an 80 page book.

Someone can certainly save their money and reproduce the experience of the
book by spending a couple of painful weeks combing through documentation and
hitting their head against walls. OR, they can spend less than what they
probably make in an hour and get the same knowledge in 80 pages.

My target audience was people that value their time far more than their money,
so that's why I spent so much effort making the book as succinct as possible.

As an aside: I'm really glad I put a price on the book. Initially I was
tempted to have it be "pay what you want" so it would be more accessible, but
that would have devalued it I think. Instead, I've offered a special cheaper
option for students, junior developers, and those in countries where the book
would be prohibitively expensive. So far, I've had about 50 people take me up
on that.

The book has been successful enough to give me another month where I don't
have to take contracts and I can focus on creating more content. If I hadn't
charged sufficiently for it, then I'd have to pause everything and do contract
work.

So, spending that extra 3 weeks making the book shorter and more focused was a
win for both me and my target customers.

For anyone curious, here's the book: [http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-
puppet-chef-salt-stack-a...](http://devopsu.com/books/taste-test-puppet-chef-
salt-stack-ansible.html)

~~~
rentnorove
IMO, your book is far too expensive. As a casual interested in dev-ops (surely
your target market), I'm completely turned off by you asking old-academia
style prices of an ebook. I appreciate you're charging to cover the
opportunity cost of your consulting, but presumably you're also aware that
pricing it on your perceived value is a suboptimal strategy. Have you
considered reducing the price to open up a larger market, and if you have,
what is your justification for not doing so?

------
jamesaguilar
Sometimes it's good to support a position with argumentation. Brevity is
saying the same thing with fewer words. In this case, the blog post is
actually saying less. That may work for something obvious, but take care
before applying this rule universally.

~~~
sengstrom
Yes. A simple assertion does little to convince me of anything.

------
chasing
(And this is where anyone with a background in writing sighs.)

~~~
ritchiea
I disagree, if you read through the first paragraph in spite of the
strikethrough text you see that the author is talking about user experience.
Web designers constantly have to find non-verbal ways of communicating with
users because on the web pages with lots of text go unread. He's not talking
to an audience of writers, he's talking to an audience of designers & product
people.

~~~
debacle
You also see that the author doesn't know how to use commas.

Taking writing advice from someone who doesn't know how to use commas is like
taking cooking advice from someone who doesn't know how to boil an egg.

~~~
rmk2
Or grammar...

> The less words you use

~~~
ucpete
I was pleased to see he figured it out by the final iteration.

>Fewer words

------
dfbrown
I think v4 has a very different message from v1-3. 1-3 seem to be saying value
your readers time by writing as succinctly as possible whereas v4 says a
shorter message is more powerful. This may sometimes be the case, but often it
is not. Many of the most powerful speeches use repetition and deliberate at
length on their message in order to emphasise it. Shortening them would
probably have made the message less powerful.

------
NovemberWest
The last sentence leaves out very important points made in the struck-through
versions about valuing the time of your audience. I am currently looking for
more information-dense delivery mechanisms, among other things. The struck-
through versions provide vivid illustration of the point, which provides a
kind of information-density. Words are not your only medium, not even in copy,
much less online generally.

------
eCa
> Write less

Write more, succinctly.

------
just2n
I disagree.

You understand my context, though, right?

------
adamtj
Write as little as possible, but not less. Consider your audience and purpose:
if you write too little, it can only be understood by those who already
understand it.

The Gettysburg address shows that less can be more. But, too little is nothing
at all: [http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/](http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/)

------
SuperChihuahua
Stephen King's rule is that the second draft of his book should be ten percent
shorter compared with the first draft.

Source: his biography On Writing ([http://www.amazon.com/Writing-10th-
Anniversary-Memoir-Craft/...](http://www.amazon.com/Writing-10th-Anniversary-
Memoir-Craft/dp/1439156816/))

------
Tloewald
If you're going to make this point, I like the story of the Oxford literature
professor (probably a reader or don or some other weird title, but professor
in US terms) who walked into class on his first day and said:

"Omit. Needless. Words."

And then:

"Omit. Needless. Words."

And then:

"Omit. Needless. Words."

And then walked out. End of first lecture.

~~~
ams6110
"Omit needless words" is from Strunk & White's _Elements of Style_

~~~
Tloewald
Yes but he follows it with a long paragraph saying the same thing in lots of
different, less clear ways. Repeating those three words three times is, in
fact, far more effective.

------
chacham15
Id like to point out that this is similar to the idea of compression. Lossless
compression is ideal, but you should not confuse lossy compression for
lossless compression. To illustrate, going from v3 to v4 is very lossy. You
lose the reason why shorter messages are better.

------
choffee
Start with a simple statement and follow up with the detail.

If you read a good newspaper article you will see it starts off with a
paragraph containing most of the detail of the story and then expands on it
later allowing the user to skim.

Blog readers, like newspaper readers, are viewing a number of stories and
reading some of them just to get the gist and others to get the detail. So the
headline is there to grab their attention and then the first paragraph has to
give enough detail that they can go away with most of the details and move on.
You can then expand later in the page for those that want a greater detail.
It's quite a skill and one that journalist and editors work hard at.

------
keesj
Ironically though, without the author's previous revisions (saying the same
thing multiple times) the article wouldn't deliver the message as well.

~~~
rmrfrmrf
The "revisions" aren't really revisions; they're part of the article. If you
have the proper context, you don't need to be verbose. For example, if I go to
your startup's website, I don't need to be told that "Company X is a
lightweight web application that..."; if you have visuals and a context,
information like "lightweight web application" is redundant.

------
pjdorrell
My own experiment in brevity: the Pitch Blurb.

(Ironically long) explanation at
[http://thinkinghard.com/blog/PitchBlurb.html](http://thinkinghard.com/blog/PitchBlurb.html).

Lots of examples in one web page at
[http://thinkinghard.com/blog/index.html](http://thinkinghard.com/blog/index.html).

------
fusiongyro
Brilliant illustration.

Terse writing has more punch, true. And for some media and most audiences,
that's what you want. Most authors use a lot of weaselly filler (like "most"
and "a lot") but not every interesting idea can be adequately conveyed by a
pithy sentence. If people keep that in mind, we'll all benefit from better
writing.

------
undoware
There's a flip side of course<br/> Just like there always is<br/> Writing,
whether text or source<br/> Is about tradeoffs, not the biz<br/>

Of perfect solutions. For example, you will find<br/> That a rhyming passage
will stay in mind<br/> Far longer than a tweet.<br/>

------
bgnm2000
This isn't a statement about grammar, or how to structure your writing pieces.
Its about articles / blogs I stumble upon (from hackernews) which are
needlessly long. I want to read something, understand the message the author
is trying to convey, and I want to move on.

------
ksrm
I absolutely hate that "don't move" kudos device. Terrible, obnoxious design.

------
bloaf
"The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to
make it shorter."

[http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TimeToMakeItShort](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TimeToMakeItShort)

------
adamzerner
There's an obvious tradeoff between speed and information. People tend to be
biased towards information (writing too much), but that doesn't mean that
"write less" is good advice.

------
Datsundere
Same thing could be said about lectures in college. I'm amazed at how much
professors can expand on for a simple little concept making the idea more
convoluted than it should be.

------
t_hozumi
I found that good books describe things in rich details. It is hard to
compress a sentence without losing information.

------
davidad_
"If I had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter." —Blaise
Pascal

------
dllthomas
"Omit words."

~~~
chasing
"Omit unnecessary words."

~~~
vickytnz
I hope everyone knows you're quoting "The Elements of Style"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style

~~~
dllthomas
... and I hope everyone is aware of both the virtues and the limits of that
work.

~~~
rthomas6
I'm not. Care to enlighten me?

~~~
FreakLegion
There was a good article in the Chronicle of Higher Education a while back:

[http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-
Grammar/2549...](http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-
Grammar/25497)

~~~
dllthomas
Note that Pullum is also the one who's probably written the most about this on
LL, but certainly that's a nice consolidated case instead of a scattering of
examples - thanks! :)

------
nazgulnarsil
Write more, edit more.

------
debacle
This is missing a single word: "Sometimes."

------
anoplus
I was waiting for this kind of message for months!

------
Imagenuity
Fewer words are also easier to proofread.

------
jalanb
comment more

------
PaulHoule
"Omit needless words"

------
teddyknox
The irony is strong.

------
scriptstar
V5 less is more!

------
adkatrit
*be concise

------
bowerbird
whatever.

-bowerbird

~~~
bowerbird
you can downvote my "whatever" until the cows come home, but -- in the end --
that's what it'll all boil down to.

seriously, ya'll have already accumulated 57 comments on a piece that says "be
brief", with a hidden qualifier of "to the greatest extent possible without
losing the plot."

how many comments will it take you before you realize that you've been sent on
a wild goose chase, chasing your tail?

and now i too have over-explained. and wasted _my_ time.

and undoubtedly will be docked a few more "karma" points, because some people
don't wanna hear they've wasted time.

-bowerbird

~~~
fusiongyro
From the guidelines:
[http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

\- Please don't sign comments, especially with your url. They're already
signed with your username. If other users want to learn more about you, they
can click on it to see your profile.

\- Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it
makes boring reading.

\- Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.

We would be happy to have your participation in a discussion, but this method
is boring, tiresome and uninteresting. If you're willing and capable of
elevating your discourse a bit I'm sure we'd appreciate what you have to say,
but if not, you may find other forums more inviting.

~~~
bowerbird
i'm not "complaining about being downmodded." it's funny. nor am i "baiting"
anyone, even though i am highly amused.

and i think it's ironic that you totally missed the point that my "whatever"
response is in keeping with the advice being offered by the article which is
the thread's topic.

while, at the same time, 87 comments have now been posted. evidently, the "be
brief" message did not register here...

and you say _i_ am the one who is "boring, tiresome, and uninteresting"?
methinks the lady doth protest too much.

-bowerbird

