Hidden Article: Writing Advice #1

Hidden Articles are not sent out as newsletters. They are usually “different” in some way - either they aren’t big enough topics to sustain an entire article, retreads of older thinking, or just something weird I wanted to try.

In a very particular sense, I don’t know how to write. It is generally known that I have a minimal-at-best level of education, the kind where “highest completed” pulldowns in my job applications generally get set to “GED/Didn’t Graduate”.

In the sense that there’s a set of rules that comprise “the best way to write”, it generally revolves around the kinds of things that get trained into you, like knowing the name of every part of a sentence, using the approved sentence structures, and being careful not to use intensifiers like “very” and “really” unless someone’s life is on the line.

I don’t have that training, which means I tend to focus on a different set of things than most when I give writing advice (or at least have a very different balance of focus on the same things). This doesn’t mean the advice I give is inherently good -I think all writing advice is potentially good or bad depending on the audience; more on that later - but it is at least distinct.

Assume a human will read what you write

I’m the kind of guy who reads articles about basses, and there’s a bass guitar maker named Carl Thompson who in an interview transcript I once read gave me an offhand quote on creating things for other people that I think about a lot:

Carl: I’m having trouble getting it out. I do believe that and I make instruments like that. And that goes into every instrument. When I put the controls in. As you notice, if you have to go in here and take these controls, and take that control plate off of there. Guess what happens? You can actually take it, turn it over and look at it. I’ve seen some guys who again make perfect instruments. Somebody comes in and says “my pots-can you look at it?” “Oh yeah, no problem.” Got to take the pickups out, you’ve got to go through all kinds of things just to look at it because…

Aaron: The wires are too short?

Carl: Yeah, they made the wires exactly the right length. This is where the controller is, this is where the pickup is, I got to make the wire that long. So whenever you do want to look at it you’ve got to go — believe me that’s part of it. That’s part of making a perfect instrument. A perfect instrument is one where you’ve got a bit of room where you can look at it. That’s a perfect instrument.

When Carl makes an instrument, he’s not trying to make an instrument that is technically perfect in the sense that everything is absolute optimized to precision; he’s making one that’s as perfect as he can get it to be while keeping in mind that a human being has to own and use it. He imagines that they might have to open it up to fix it later, and makes that easy. He understands the fretboard might eventually need repair, so he makes it thick enough that someone can do that.

I’m picking this out of a hat, but now think about that in terms of something like “communicating a concept to your reader”. Your reader is (presumably) a human person; they have a limited attention span. You (presumably) think what you are writing is important for them to know. Keep both of those things in mind when you read the following incredibly popular and widely adopted writing advice from Scott Adams:

I went from being a bad writer to a good writer after taking a one-day course in “business writing.” I couldn’t believe how simple it was. I’ll tell you the main tricks here so you don’t have to waste a day in class.

Business writing is about clarity and persuasion. The main technique is keeping things simple. Simple writing is persuasive. A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences. Don’t fight it.

Simple means getting rid of extra words. Don’t write, “He was very happy” when you can write “He was happy.” You think the word “very” adds something. It doesn’t. Prune your sentences.

Humor writing is a lot like business writing. It needs to be simple. The main difference is in the choice of words. For humor, don’t say “drink” when you can say “swill.”

Your first sentence needs to grab the reader. Go back and read my first sentence to this post. I rewrote it a dozen times. It makes you curious. That’s the key.

Write short sentences. Avoid putting multiple thoughts in one sentence. Readers aren’t as smart as you’d think.

Is this bad advice? Not entirely. There’s a place for short, saltine-dry sentences. But putting that in a “human will read this” context makes it easy to imagine a person getting bored halfway through your article in the same way you’d find it hard to finish a large bowl of very bland soup. Short declarative sentences are generally clearer, but that doesn’t do you any good when your reader has long since switched to skim-mode or stopped reading entirely.

To show you the same problem from the opposite side, I’ve selected a bit of advice from the most overlong masturbatory writing essay I’ve ever seen. Note that what I’m about to show you is probably the least wordy, most succinct part of the entire article; the rest of it is much worse:

1. Always use the word that most exactly means what you wish to say, in utter indifference to how common or familiar that word happens to be. A writer should never fret over what his or her readers may or may not know, and should worry only about underestimating them. As Nabokov said, a good reader always comes prepared with a dictionary and never resents being introduced to a new term.

Imagine thinking this - that your reader is so committed to slogging through your impenetrable horror of pinky-out tea-drinker writing that they are both willing and happy to stop reading, open a dictionary, and find the definition of some college-word you learned so you could think you were winning at parties back before people stopped inviting you to them.

Both of these pieces of advice were given as absolutes, presented as if they were the final say on the “correct way to write”. They aren’t. That’s not because they are bad; even if they are, the problem is more general and foundational than that.

All writing advice for “keeping in mind”

Return your attention to Scott Adam’s advice from the last section. Do you know where that writing advice is actually very relevant? Business writing. That’s where he got the advice in the first place, and it’s great for that context: If you absolutely need Bonnie to show up to a meeting at 3:00 PM, then “Bonnie, please report to the meeting room at 3:00 PM” does just fine and avoids confusion.

Scott Adam’s writing advice rippled out through the tech-writing sphere really fast, because it’s also a bit applicable there; tech people have a tendency to be information-gobblers, and in their pursuit of little discrete pieces of data will on average tolerate dry, stripped-down writing other people.

Now consider the writing advice from the long-winded guy, who, again, writes like this:

This, from Ecclesiastes, is definitely a grand and gradual music, luminously clear in many respects; but it is not exactly austere; it is also quite complex in its cadences and syntax. True, its gleaming paratactic flow contrasts strikingly with Browne’s massy hypotactic architectonics.

And yes, this is terrible - it’s the worst. But there’s audiences for it, and you know who they are? People who primarily aren’t there to learn or be entertained. It’s for people who want to read something that makes them feel smart, and for whom smart is things like “Reads Shakespeare” and “plays chess”. That’s not generally my market (at least in the sense that it’s the primary thing my readers want), but it’s a real market that deserves to get served.

The failure mode comes in when you take these things to be rules, and end up writing a piece that’s meant to convey valuable information in the latter style, where it can only be absorbed by someone who knows what “hypotactic architectonics” are without looking it up. Or when you take the Scott Adams advice to be true, and try to relate anything but news stories, business related writing, or valuable discrete data-driven concepts with it.

The trick is to treat all writing advice as something to keep in mind. You want to think of writing advice as someone pointing out a possible failure mode to you, and examine your writing in the context of what you are trying to convey to a particular audience, and then adjust as needed to actually serve your audience in the particular context of your piece.

This is a little bit harder because all writing advice is given by someone who thinks it’s worked well for them, myself included. They don’t always have varied context of the kind that lets them know that your heart-felt memory of the best summer you ever had doesn’t necessarily benefit from stripped-down language, or that you might not be good at stripped-down language in the first place. They don’t know that kind of thing about you, but you can; you have to adjust for it yourself or your writing will suffer.

Writing advice is rules of thumb, not law. Read it, take what you need, keep it in mind, and move on.

Write inter-dependant paragraphs

Weird formatting to make a point:

People tend to be pretty good at keeping track of the flow of sentences; it’s hard not to. —> Words like “but”, “however” and however you reword “thusly” so you don’t sound like a robot help with that. —> You’ve probably even noticed me varying the length and tone of my sentences to keep your eyes happy - you understand that I’m doing my best to keep a rhythm going. —> The language you’ve been taught since you were a child focused on individual paragraphs and it’s likely you are good at flow in that context.

—>

I assume that most people are good at that kind of sentence-to-sentence continuity, you included. But are you good at paragraph flow? Can you transition one paragraph to the next in a way your reader not only can follow, but can’t fail to follow? Do your paragraphs support each other? Does one paragraph lead into the next? Does the next paragraph build off the last?

—>

Ideally, your paragraphs do flow into each other. I’m going to stop with the weird emphasis arrow thing now, but I think you get it; it’s fundamentally harder to transition from paragraph to paragraph than it is from one sentence to the next. Where I see newer writers failing to maintain flow, it’s more often because of this than any other factor.

Here’s a badly written nonsense example:

Bob was having trouble getting around his ranch. Where there were roads, they were rough. Where there weren’t roads, there just… weren’t roads, I guess. He was constantly dealing with flat tires, having to manage gas supply for his ranch truck, getting stuck in the mud and all the other difficulties that come with going everywhere sheep can go.

Horses eat grass. Horses handle difficult terrain well, better than most motorized vehicles. They have iron shoes that win fights against rocks. Bob switched to horses, and it made all the difference.

Now consider this alternative:

Bob was having trouble getting around his ranch. Where there were roads, they were rough. Where there weren’t roads, there just… weren’t roads, I guess. He was constantly dealing with flat tires, having to manage gas supply for his ranch truck, getting stuck in the mud and all the other difficulties that come with going everywhere sheep can go.

Things changed when Bob realized a simple fact: horses aren’t cars. Horses don’t need gas; they eat grass. They don’t get stuck in the mud. Their iron shoes are much more likely to win battles with sharp rocks than soft rubber tires. Bob made the switch to horses, and it made all the difference.

The second is fundamentally better writing - it flows where the first one fails to do so. This is because both paragraphs in the first example can do without each other - they are both whole and complete without each other’s context. They don’t need each other, which means on a fundamental level they aren’t interacting with each other, which means that it’s impossible for them to create a good reading flow.

Here’s a good example of paragraph flow from Freddie DeBoer:

Inevitably, what gets lost is the notion that music has any inherent quality at all. As I said at the time, the problem with Liz Phair’s self-titled album - that the music is utter dogshit that causes the listener to question their existing affection for her earlier work - can’t be fixed through reference to the place of women in serious music discussion in 2003. Because it’s a dreadful album. And writing a freshman Women’s Studies paper about it rather than a review of it as a collection of music is in fact the biggest disrespect of all.

It’s for this reason that I find Larson’s criticism of the reasons that some might like Måneskin to be hypocritical and lacking in self-knowledge; he’s writing in the temple of treating music as a badge for identifying the kind of person you are while complaining that other people are doing the same thing.

The second paragraph can’t live without the first. Without the first paragraph, it makes no sense, which also means that the paragraphs are fundamentally dependent on each other - Freddie couldn’t have written that paragraph transition without having a working understanding of what he was trying to say and the general path he wanted to take to get there.

When someone reads Freddie’s article (what article? you can’t know without the last paragraph, right?), they are in a steady current that pulls them from example to example - by the time they reach the conclusion, they’ve been feeling the direction of that flow for a while and are anticipating the conclusion. It’s good writing.

Now, say you want that good writing (oh, I remember “good writing” as a concept introduced in the last paragraph, I see where he’s going), and you are working on a piece and want to integrate this kind of paragraph transition handshaking into it. Your first temptation is going to be to use one of a few cheater tools to accomplish this by shoe-horning your pre-existing sentence-to-sentence flow mastery over paragraph-to-paragraph needs.

For example, let’s return to the riveting tale of Bob’s CarHorse:

Bob was having trouble getting around his ranch. Where there were roads, they were rough. Where there weren’t roads, there just… weren’t roads, I guess. He was constantly dealing with flat tires, having to manage gas supply for his ranch truck, getting stuck in the mud and all the other difficulties that come with going everywhere sheep can go.

However, horses eat grass and handle difficult terrain as well or better than most motorized vehicles. They have iron shoes that win fights against rocks. Bob switched to horses, and it made all the difference.

That “however” transition works, and it’s better than our first “broken” version of this story. It introduces some flow. But it’s fundamentally a sentence-to-sentence tool, like the “but” at the head of this one. Besides being a bit overlong, you will notice that the new passage works just as well as a single paragraph as it does two:

Bob was having trouble getting around his ranch. Where there were roads, they were rough. Where there weren’t roads, there just… weren’t roads, I guess. He was constantly dealing with flat tires, having to manage gas supply for his ranch truck, getting stuck in the mud and all the other difficulties that come with going everywhere sheep can go. However, horses eat grass and handle difficult terrain as well or better than most motorized vehicles. They have iron shoes that win fights against rocks. Bob switched to horses, and it made all the difference.

Writing rules being guidelines, I want to shoot straight with you and admit that both of the last two examples aren’t exactly broken; they work. The first of the last two even works well enough that some people might prefer it to the first “fixed” version I showed you - it has a certain spareness to it that reads just fine and might suit certain voices.

—>

So what am I up to? What I’m actually doing here is trying to get you to notice this interdependence a bit more than you have before. Some paragraphs don’t and shouldn’t handshake - you will try to get them to do it and they will fight back until you realize that you’ve hit an exception.

—>

In that situation, you have full permission to ignore me. I want you to have that flexibility. But if you’ve never thought about this before, go back and look at previous writing you’ve done. I’ll all but guarantee you it either doesn’t flow as well as you’d like, or that “however” occurs dozens of times an article.

Thinking about this kind of thing primes you to notice that and build better and better-thought-out paragraphs that more naturally work with each other to make a cohesive whole that your reader can follow.

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That’s it for now! If you’ve found this article, thanks - it’s good to know you check even when you don’t get emails. I’m welcoming feedback on the idea of the “hidden article”, so if you particularly like it or don’t like it let me know in the comments.

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