Rules of good writing (2007)

>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.

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.

Over 80% of the world's languages are classified as SVO or SOV, actually, and probably over 90% of all first language speakers today speak one of these two. Their overwhelming dominance compared to the other four possibilities have led researchers to conclude there may actually be a cognitive benefit to putting the subject first.

arabic can be VSO or SVO. i'm rather new to the langauge but tend to prefer VSO when writing, even as a native english speaker, which gets me to wonder if theres a correlation somewhere between arabic proficiency, other known languages, and VSO/SVO preference. my preference might come from the relative conciseness of VSO in arabic though; often placing the subject before the verb is a bit redundant given context. i'm sure theres a correlation to programming language typing schema somewhere there :)

I had the same thought, glad you phrased it so succinctly! Surprisingly, a Holocaust-denying white nationalist is not someone you should trust on matters concerning global anthropology.

Interesting see I. Don't Yoda harshly judge. ;o)

VSO is kinda like AT&T-syntax x86 assembly, if you identify subject with source and object with destination:

    add %rdi, %rax

woah

I suspect they were talking about Scott Adams; not Michael Lynch (but it's fuzzy, due to ... unclear writing).

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.

I think the counterargument to this simplistic assertion is that "The boy was hit by a ball" seems equally legible to me to "A ball hit the boy". If you're quickly reporting the details of an accident to a doctor and it's crucial to get the information across quickly, I think many speakers would still start with "He was hit by a ball", not "A ball hit him." We're not interested in assigning agency to the ball here, we're interested in the effects on the boy. We're focusing down on the boy first, then talking about what is happening. Is he hitting a ball? Getting hit by a ball? Nobody cares what the ball's doing, it doesn't need to be prepped for surgery.

I weirdly learned this by chance. Most, if not all, Indian languages (as far as I know) are spoken/written in the passive voice. It sounds more respectful that way. Hence, the default way for us Indians is to speak English in the passive voice.

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.

> Both sentences mean the same

Not really. The first sentence is about a boy, the second is about a ball. The best one to use depends on context.

Imagine how boring literature (or really most sorts of writing) would be if we optimized it around theories of linguistic efficiency rather than taste. I'm left entirely unconvinced.

It's good to combined both to form a sort of palindrome to chain ideas together. This is explained in more detail in Style: Toward Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams.

>Holocaust-denying

Didn't he write "no reasonable person doubts that the Holocaust happened" in the blog post you are referring to? That's an....unusual way to deny the Holocaust.

There probably is. For me receiving the subject after anything else requires me to buffer everything else awaiting the subject in order to parse it correctly. My brain seems to naturally work in cause->effect order so it's naturally easiest for me to process the cause first and then the effect. I don't think everyone works the same way, but there is definitely an order of information flow that is most efficient for me. I also generally seem to process things somewhat like an LLM would...

Or, in "Intel Latin" (machine code),

  01001000 00000001 11111000

Anyone optimizing for some specific taste already has an implicit theory of linguistic efficiency. 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.

> Anyone optimizing for some specific taste already has an implicit theory of linguistic efficiency

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.

"I think many speakers would still start with "He was hit by a ball", not "A ball hit him." We're not interested in assigning agency to the ball here, we're interested in the effects on the boy."

And you don't favor the shorter message?

I think you're onto something with "agency". In particular, "a car hit him" seems much less out-of-place than "a ball hit him", but we're more used to treating cars as first-class objects with agency, as compared to how we perceive balls.

"My brain seems to naturally work in cause->effect order"

You must be Jesus. Most brains observe events first and use that information to reason about their causes.

A discredited organization labeled Adams a Holocaust-denier, so NPCs consider him such.

> 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.

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.

Ha. That for me actually seems to be impaired, which is why I had to do special education. These days I usually have enough of a knowledge base to build hypotheses for most situations, but it was far more difficult for me to reason about the cause of things that I had nothing else to relate to. Stuff like this is probably why autism tends to be treated like some sort of super learning impediment.

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.