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Rules of good writing (2007)

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103 points santiviquez | 4 comments | 07 Jul 25 14:03 UTC | HN request time: 0.992s | source
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mtlynch ◴[08 Jul 25 23:50 UTC] No.44505052[source]▶
>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.

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hiAndrewQuinn ◴[08 Jul 25 23:57 UTC] No.44505091[source]▶
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.
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1. mackeye ◴[09 Jul 25 00:09 UTC] No.44505147[source]▶
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 :)
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2. senkora ◴[09 Jul 25 00:41 UTC] No.44505298[source]▶
VSO is kinda like AT&T-syntax x86 assembly, if you identify subject with source and object with destination:

    add %rdi, %rax
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3. skrueger ◴[09 Jul 25 02:13 UTC] No.44505757[source]▶
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.
4. jll29 ◴[09 Jul 25 02:22 UTC] No.44505795[source]▶
Or, in "Intel Latin" (machine code),

  01001000 00000001 11111000