

Paul Graham and "It turns out" - bkudria
http://jsomers.net/blog/it-turns-out

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daniel-cussen
I think Douglas Adams talked about how he used that phrase in Salmon of Doubt:

“Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression ‘it turns out’ to be
incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative
connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the
trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is. It’s great.
It’s hugely better than its predecessors ‘I read somewhere that...’ or the
craven ‘they say that...’ because it suggests not only that whatever flimsy
bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually based on brand new,
ground breaking research, but that it’s research in which you yourself were
intimately involved. But again, with no actual authority anywhere in sight.”

~~~
jazzychad
Funny this was also the top-voted comment on the previous discussion of this
same post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1163040>

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jimbokun
I just want to know how you managed to resist phrasing your statement as:

"It turns out this was also the top-voted comment on the previous discussion
of this same post..."

~~~
seigenblues
Because, If we were to do so, "it turns out" would be immediately followed by
a citation of the authority in question?

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tptacek
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1162965>

(How did this even get posted?)

It's a really good post though.

~~~
jey
I think the dupe-detector only checks against URLs that have already been
lazy-loaded into memory since the last time the server was restarted.

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kwantam
I often use it in a slightly different role: to introduce a new idea or
discovery I've made without sounding like I'm fishing for compliments:

"I've thought a lot about a better way to implement this circuit, and it turns
out that there is one."

I'm sure I subconsciously use it for the "appeal to invisible authority"
thing, too.

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atuladhar
The following comment on the blog cracked me up, mainly because of how true it
is.

Bob says:

August 25, 2010 at 6:21 am

one word: “RADIOLAB”

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zeynel1
''in other words, because “it turns out” is the sort of phrase you would use
to convey, for example, something unexpected about a phenomenon you’ve studied
extensively—as in the scientist saying “…but the E. coli turned out to be
totally resistant”—or some buried fact that you have recently discovered on
behalf of your readers—as when the Malcolm Gladwells of the world say “…and it
turns out all these experts have something in common: 10,000 hours of
deliberate practice”—readers are trained, slowly but surely, to be disarmed by
it.''

i —like— writers who use —dashes— extensively

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Dickinson#Structure_and_s...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Dickinson#Structure_and_syntax)

~~~
lionhearted
I use dashes a lot when I write - it tells a person, keep going, the thought
you're about to read is still part of one thought, but separate slightly from
the first part of the sentence.

While it looks ugly under analysis and would get you marked down by an English
teacher, I find it pretty good at communicating quickly and getting points
across.

~~~
zeynel1
\--I use dashes a lot when I write--

ive been experimenting with a writing style that used hyphen as the only
punctuation - <http://makebelieve1.wordpress.com/about/> \- but i realized
that wordpress.com converts hyphens with spaces on either side into en-dashes
and two hyphens into em-dashes

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sabat
I really used to like that phrase; it makes real life into more of a
narrative. Now it's becoming overused (that's not pg's fault). I'm avoiding
it. Quel dommage.

~~~
_delirium
In academic writing it's been overused for at least 10 years now, to the point
where some reviewers will complain if you use it in a paper. Apart from being
overused, in a lot of contexts it's something of an abdication of
responsibility: _you_ really did something, or are arguing something, but are
trying to do a coy "well lookee, what did we find here" routine.

