I agree with this, but I doubt that all brains work this way. It's probably true of almost all English speakers.
I think the processing effort is likely a side effect of English mainly using sentence constructions that go subject->verb->object. Not all languages do that, so I suspect that your brain has an easier time processing whatever's most common in the language.
Perhaps it's a tech startup thing? After all programmers are not famous for their refined literary taste. And then you check the few LitMag that people care enough to pay for even when the content is available for free, like Clarkesworld or BCS. Then you find sentences there are generally not crispy and short.
It turns out there aren't rules. All guidelines are contextual.
If you approach (or would like to approach) writing more from the perspective of a craft rather than meeting KPIs, Stephen King's On Writing is great.
Or maybe I mean "Omit."
Or maybe if I didn't even post a reply, I would have added the same value to this thread.
Spoiler: You are not Paul Graham.
I'm not a huge fan of Scott Adams, because I disagree with his worldview, but I have other hills to die on.
He’s not wrong about this, but he’s just repeating very old “tribal knowledge,” about writing. I’ve been hearing the same advice, since I was a kid. Sometimes, I even follow it.
Early on, I forced myself to write and speak in the active voice. Now, I believe, it comes naturally to write or speak English the “right” way.
"Readers comprehend “the boy hit the ball” quicker than “the ball was hit by the boy.” Both sentences mean the same, but it’s easier to imagine the object (the boy) before the action (the hitting). All brains work that way. (Notice I didn’t say, “That is the way all brains work”?)".
It should be, "the SUBJECT (the boy) before the action (the hitting)." (I added caps for emphasis.)
If you're content to remain nameless then you can reach millions of readers.
In this sentence, boy=subject, hit=verb, ball=object.
> All brains work that way.
If language sentence structure reflects how brains think, then that's not entirely true. While most languages are SVO (subject-verb-object), not all are. Japanese is SOV (subject-object-verb), while biblical Hebrew is/was VSO (verb-subject-object). I'm sure there are other variations.
EDIT: it just occurred to me that Japanese SVO is syntactically similar to Forth/RPN.
Paul Graham illustrates in his post, “Good Writing”.[1]
“How does that help the writer? Because the writer is the first reader.”
This is also supported by Graham’s post “Writes and Write-Nots”[2]
“To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard.”
I don’t take Paul Graham’s word as gospel, but I have yet to find any contradictory stance, let alone one that’s been useful to me.
1: https://paulgraham.com/goodwriting.html 2: https://www.paulgraham.com/writes.html
As to the writing, I think its influence (in terms of ideas) makes people overrate its stylistic quality. An enjoyable critique: https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
I don't follow. How do you connect taste and efficiency in your perspective? Efficiency in what terms? They seem almost unrelated from my perspective.
> Most writers aren’t optimizing for anything at all, and they have no taste, and their writing is boring, and it wastes my time, and I hate it.
Wasting time is probably my favorite reason to read. Cannot disagree more.
YC grew out of a talk I gave to the Harvard Computer Society (the undergrad computer club) about how to start a startup. Everyone else in the audience was probably local, but Steve and Alexis came up on the train from the University of Virginia, where they were seniors. Since they'd come so far I agreed to meet them for coffee.
The talk he gave was How To Start A Startup [2]. The reason he was asked to give that talk was not because he had money, but because he was a Harvard CS alum who had built/sold a successful startup then spent the subsequent few years sharing his knowledge/ideas via books and essays.
The reason Steve knew about pg was that he had read/liked his Lisp book and read/liked his essays on Slashdot.
Money was a necessary but not sufficient condition for him to start YC. Nobody would have applied to YC if not for his books and essays.
Whether the title draws more readers than "Rules of clear writing" is a separate topic, one dealing less with principles and more with marketing.
Strunk & White, the source for most of the article's ideas, isn't mentioned. We may bury the past, but we can't deny it.
I recently boiled my copy of Strunk & White until little remained. At the bottom of the pot was "Make every word count."
Orwell also knew to avoid clichés, and lo, he made a much stronger argument for simplicity in his essays. "Keep it simple" means nothing by itself and Adams does not explain the concepts he hints at or even call them by their proper names.
None of the above would seem obnoxious had he actually cited Orwell.
The reason he got into venture capital was that some of those essays urged ambitious young people to start startups, drawing on his own experience, and specifically to write SaaS software in Lisp, as he had. The Y Combinator fund came afterwards, and its dealflow came from the people who had been persuaded by those essays. That's why the first version of Reddit was written in Lisp.
If Y Combinator had not been successful, he would have remained well known for his essays.
Though some of his ideas were not correct, looking back, it is hard to name any other writer of persuasive essays of the past quarter century whose work has been similarly impactful, except perhaps Mencius Moldbug. Moldbug's work may turn out to be less impactful—I certainly hope it does—but it's too early to tell.
And you don't favor the shorter message?
Meanwhile, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace gives concrete advice, examples, and exercises.
This isn't true at all. Passive voice is extremely common in everyday speech, and sentences constructed with linking verbs are almost certainly more common than either active or passive voice.
And that accounting of the language considers only utterances consistinf od grammatically correct, complete main clauses, which constitute by far the minority of the sentential constructions a native speaker of English will produce in a day.
If everything you said in a normal day were a complete sentence, let alone uniformly or predominantly active voice, you'd sound completely deranged and unhinged.
If whatever's most common in the language really were easiest for readers or listeners to understand, then active-voice constructions should be the most cognitively challenging. They aren't.
Is that wrong though? If the poll is true it would be half of Blacks who are racist. If half of Muslims would say it is not OK to be a Jew, would a jewish person be in the right to be wary of them?
Of course that is already happening and in the US all racial/ethnic groups cluster together and segregate themselves.
> agree or disagree with this statement: 'It's OK to be white.'
Of the black respondents, 53% agreed, 26% disagreed, 21% weren't sure. The slogan "it's OK to be white" has been heavily used in white supremacist campaigns. Many of the 26% who disagreed, may have been disagreeing with it's use to white supremacy.
It's one of the few books that approaches the topic in a systematic, structured way. Not a rehash of platitudes like "try and be concise".
I know I need to "omit needless words". What I don't know is which words are "needless". Style answers that with linguistics and cognitive psychology.
When Calvin Coolidge, asked by his wife what the preacher had preached on, replied, “Sin,” and, asked what the preacher had said, replied, “He was against it,” he was brief enough. But one hardly envies Mrs. Coolidge.
Anyway, I think about causes first when I am either performing actions or processing other performances of actions. It's one of the reasons why I can appear to be good at empathy to certain people, because I can usually nail down the exact reason for something far better than others can guess why it maybe could have happened. It's weird how that works sometimes.