I’m somewhat worried that this problem might be even more widespread. For example, “show, don’t tell” is the standard advice in writing guides, so I was intrigued to see my friend write:
There is another thing about “showing” that bugs me, and it’s that very often, when I read guides and such about how to “show” rather than “tell”, the only thing I see in those guides is that “showing” conveys different information than “telling”. They create different scenes. And of course I have more problems with the scenes that “show”.
When the scene is “shown”, I have a hard time staying with the text and understanding what’s going on. If I’m not told what a particular thing means, it starts just seeming nonsensical to me. The author (and many readers) might understand the tone of voice of a character whose line is written in a certain way, but I’m likely to miss it. And so I’ll end up clueless as to the character’s state of mind. Now, if I was TOLD exactly what the character’s state of mind is, no problem. I might be bad at imagining certain emotions, but it’s definitely easier to read exactly what it’s supposed to be than to try to find and guess what parts show it.
Maybe it’s just me, though. That doesn’t make me less frustrated with writing that routinely frustrates me with what I often perceive as non sequiturs. Therefore, I hope that more writings BOTH “showed” AND “told”! At least I’m trying to aim for both showing and telling in my writings from now on.
I read somewhere that the taste of an experienced film critic is typically very different from the taste of somebody who only watches movies every now and then, and it seems like there should be a similar effect with writing—the kind of people who end up becoming authors or creating writing guides are likely to be atypical, and to have a atypical tastes. Since most writing guides seem to be based on the author’s personal taste as opposed to anything resembling an objective survey, I’m uncertain of how well their advice actually generalizes. (This being Less Wrong, I cannot avoid the obvious hypothesis that the “show, don’t tell” rule is partially an attempt to signal sophistication.)
I read somewhere that the taste of an experienced film critic is typically very different from the taste of somebody who only watches movies every now and then
I just had a conversation about this last night. I was saying that I don’t pay much attention to what movie critics say, and use the ratings of non-professionals because it’s just better correlated with what I like.
I’m somewhat worried that this problem might be even more widespread. For example, “show, don’t tell” is the standard advice in writing guides, so I was intrigued to see my friend write:
I read somewhere that the taste of an experienced film critic is typically very different from the taste of somebody who only watches movies every now and then, and it seems like there should be a similar effect with writing—the kind of people who end up becoming authors or creating writing guides are likely to be atypical, and to have a atypical tastes. Since most writing guides seem to be based on the author’s personal taste as opposed to anything resembling an objective survey, I’m uncertain of how well their advice actually generalizes. (This being Less Wrong, I cannot avoid the obvious hypothesis that the “show, don’t tell” rule is partially an attempt to signal sophistication.)
I just had a conversation about this last night. I was saying that I don’t pay much attention to what movie critics say, and use the ratings of non-professionals because it’s just better correlated with what I like.