Something I have learnt from this series of posts and the comments on them (including mine):
Most people have no real idea what it is that separates good writing from bad, except that we know it when we see it
When we read your posts, most of us get a vague sense of them being long/uninteresting. But the specific criticisms of your writing are virtually all instances of a bias (availability?) where we try to quantify our vague sense of ‘don’t like’ by grabbing something salient out of the post, such as your use of pronouns or the inclusion of unnecessarily specific details. It’s possible that any or all of those things are actually problems, but they’re probably not the sole cause. Most writing advice on the web is also like this. The stuff that’s actually important for good writing is much harder to communicate.
it’s more likely that the actual cause of your posts feeling long/uninteresting is a more systemic issue. My best guess is that you’re not sure which parts of your new improved mindset are actually important, and which were incidental to the instrumental gains, so you feel like it’s all relevant and it all needs to be communicated, when in fact either only a subset is relevant, or else the insights build on each other in a non-obvious way so that they need to be communicated in a much more precise order than you’ve done so far in order to not appear as noise.
I really appreciate the very thoughtful nature of your continued feedback. Thanks!
I think I may attempt to include fewer examples in future posts; this post had 4, which is quite a lot.
It seems likely that my difficulty writing posts that don’t feel long/uninteresting is something systemic; I think one of the more likely candidates is aiming to include more material than most people want/require-for-understanding. Whether I’m right or not, I feel I have a very good handle on which parts of the new mindset are important. I think the problem may be adding too much detail to each of the individual points in that presentation.
It’s certainly true that the “stuff that’s actually important for good writing is harder to communicate” specifically, constructively and diplomatically.
Something I have learnt from this series of posts and the comments on them (including mine):
Most people have no real idea what it is that separates good writing from bad, except that we know it when we see it
When we read your posts, most of us get a vague sense of them being long/uninteresting. But the specific criticisms of your writing are virtually all instances of a bias (availability?) where we try to quantify our vague sense of ‘don’t like’ by grabbing something salient out of the post, such as your use of pronouns or the inclusion of unnecessarily specific details. It’s possible that any or all of those things are actually problems, but they’re probably not the sole cause. Most writing advice on the web is also like this. The stuff that’s actually important for good writing is much harder to communicate.
it’s more likely that the actual cause of your posts feeling long/uninteresting is a more systemic issue. My best guess is that you’re not sure which parts of your new improved mindset are actually important, and which were incidental to the instrumental gains, so you feel like it’s all relevant and it all needs to be communicated, when in fact either only a subset is relevant, or else the insights build on each other in a non-obvious way so that they need to be communicated in a much more precise order than you’ve done so far in order to not appear as noise.
I really appreciate the very thoughtful nature of your continued feedback. Thanks!
I think I may attempt to include fewer examples in future posts; this post had 4, which is quite a lot.
It seems likely that my difficulty writing posts that don’t feel long/uninteresting is something systemic; I think one of the more likely candidates is aiming to include more material than most people want/require-for-understanding. Whether I’m right or not, I feel I have a very good handle on which parts of the new mindset are important. I think the problem may be adding too much detail to each of the individual points in that presentation.
It’s certainly true that the “stuff that’s actually important for good writing is harder to communicate” specifically, constructively and diplomatically.