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Rules of good writing (2007)

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102 points santiviquez | 4 comments | 07 Jul 25 14:03 UTC | HN request time: 0.617s | 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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1. MangoToupe ◴[09 Jul 25 02:05 UTC] No.44505711[source]▶
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.
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2. riwsky ◴[09 Jul 25 03:52 UTC] No.44506191[source]▶
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.
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3. MangoToupe ◴[09 Jul 25 04:14 UTC] No.44506289[source]▶
> 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.

4. ◴[09 Jul 25 15:11 UTC] No.44510998[source]▶