I always wanted it to be clear to the reader if I was referring to an idea of Adams, my idea, or something from another LR writer.
It’s a book review: the default is going to be Adams. If you’re talking about your idea or something from another writer, then you should call it out explicitly, and you shouldn’t do it much since you’re reviewing Adams.
A better writer, however, probably could have accomplished this without being so repetitive.
Taboo “better writer”, and look at it from an information theory point of view: you want an efficient data encoding, so the shortest code will not be the one where you call something out in most sentences. Writing in the large depends on structures whose purpose is to let you refer to something once as a default context, so you don’t have to say it over and over.
For example, you could use subheadings, of “Adams says:” followed by a series of ideas, followed by other subheads for other people. Or, if you are trying to compare and contrast lots of ideas in this way, use a tabular structure, or a “dueling quotes” style where you do something like:
Adams: “some provocative thought”
Yudkowsky: “similar provocative thought”
Adams: “random musing”
Yvain: “parallel musing”
In essence, it’s not so much about better “writing” as better organization or presentation. Which is technically part of writing, but easier to learn if you taboo “better writing” and approach it from a data structures perspective.
(Huh. Funny, I never actually thought of it this way before, but that’s really where I think about this kind of stuff from: I think of it the way I think of data structures in programming, which are all about optimizing your representation format for a particular performance goal. The same is true in writing, in that the structure of a piece needs to reflect the change you want to make in your reader’s thinking. So, if you want them to think, “Adams’ advice parallels LW thinking in a lot of areas”, the natural structure of the review should reflect those parallels as directly as possible, rather than talking around them.)
It’s a book review: the default is going to be Adams. If you’re talking about your idea or something from another writer, then you should call it out explicitly, and you shouldn’t do it much since you’re reviewing Adams.
Taboo “better writer”, and look at it from an information theory point of view: you want an efficient data encoding, so the shortest code will not be the one where you call something out in most sentences. Writing in the large depends on structures whose purpose is to let you refer to something once as a default context, so you don’t have to say it over and over.
For example, you could use subheadings, of “Adams says:” followed by a series of ideas, followed by other subheads for other people. Or, if you are trying to compare and contrast lots of ideas in this way, use a tabular structure, or a “dueling quotes” style where you do something like:
Adams: “some provocative thought”
Yudkowsky: “similar provocative thought”
Adams: “random musing”
Yvain: “parallel musing”
In essence, it’s not so much about better “writing” as better organization or presentation. Which is technically part of writing, but easier to learn if you taboo “better writing” and approach it from a data structures perspective.
(Huh. Funny, I never actually thought of it this way before, but that’s really where I think about this kind of stuff from: I think of it the way I think of data structures in programming, which are all about optimizing your representation format for a particular performance goal. The same is true in writing, in that the structure of a piece needs to reflect the change you want to make in your reader’s thinking. So, if you want them to think, “Adams’ advice parallels LW thinking in a lot of areas”, the natural structure of the review should reflect those parallels as directly as possible, rather than talking around them.)