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Rules of good writing (2007)

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103 points santiviquez | 3 comments | 07 Jul 25 14:03 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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. LoganDark ◴[09 Jul 25 02:18 UTC] No.44505781[source]▶
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...
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2. GGByron ◴[09 Jul 25 05:51 UTC] No.44506703[source]▶
"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.

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3. LoganDark ◴[09 Jul 25 10:27 UTC] No.44508245[source]▶
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.