It was written mostly for high school children, but it has lots of solid advice and its primary focus is something crucial: making your writing more interesting to read, aside from writing style.
The sections, “AVOID THE OBVIOUS CONTENT, “TAKE THE LESS USUAL SIDE”, and “GET RID OF OBVIOUS PADDING” are most likely useless or groan-worthy obvious to anyone who’s at all likely to read this comment. The only section I think is particularly likely to be relevant to rationality writers is “CALL A FOOL A FOOL”.
Still, it’s a pretty entertaining essay, worth reading in full unless you’re really that fucking busy like Luke Muehlhauser is.
The best idea in the whole essay is,
Those sentences that come to you whole, or in two or three doughy lumps, are sure to be bad sentences. They are no creation of yours but pieces of common thought floating in the community soup.
My impression is that high school writing assignments tend not to ask for as much volume as a student can reasonably produce without padding, but college writing assignments frequently ask for more.
If one professor gives assignments demanding at least ten pages, about topics that all invite at least that much legitimate content, other professors will feel the need to assign papers of similar length, lest they give the impression that their topics are less important, or their subject less demanding. Everyone learns to pad, and comes away with the impression that an important document should be long, because the more heavily graded their assignments are, the more page volume they demand.
I remember one of my professors assigned a twelve page paper detailing the results of the experiments our groups had spent the semester on. Mine was late, because the amount of informational content really only justified about half of that, and I was struggling to pad the paper to double length without turning it into something I would be embarrassed to hand in. When I turned the paper in to the professor, unhappy with its quality but not wanting to get more points taken off for lateness, he was astonished by the quality of my writing, and emailed me to tell me that he was confused by my claims to have struggled with the assignment, because my paper was easily the best out of the class. I found this unsurprising; he must have developed low standards for the papers his students would turn in, because his expectations for volume and content were completely out of synch.
That’s funny. I had the opposite experience. In High School I just learned how to pad things out, and in college everything was actually sensible-length assignments.
Something recently reminded me of Paul McHenry Roberts’s How to Say Nothing in 500 Words.
It was written mostly for high school children, but it has lots of solid advice and its primary focus is something crucial: making your writing more interesting to read, aside from writing style.
The sections, “AVOID THE OBVIOUS CONTENT, “TAKE THE LESS USUAL SIDE”, and “GET RID OF OBVIOUS PADDING” are most likely useless or groan-worthy obvious to anyone who’s at all likely to read this comment. The only section I think is particularly likely to be relevant to rationality writers is “CALL A FOOL A FOOL”.
Still, it’s a pretty entertaining essay, worth reading in full unless you’re really that fucking busy like Luke Muehlhauser is.
The best idea in the whole essay is,
My impression is that high school writing assignments tend not to ask for as much volume as a student can reasonably produce without padding, but college writing assignments frequently ask for more.
If one professor gives assignments demanding at least ten pages, about topics that all invite at least that much legitimate content, other professors will feel the need to assign papers of similar length, lest they give the impression that their topics are less important, or their subject less demanding. Everyone learns to pad, and comes away with the impression that an important document should be long, because the more heavily graded their assignments are, the more page volume they demand.
I remember one of my professors assigned a twelve page paper detailing the results of the experiments our groups had spent the semester on. Mine was late, because the amount of informational content really only justified about half of that, and I was struggling to pad the paper to double length without turning it into something I would be embarrassed to hand in. When I turned the paper in to the professor, unhappy with its quality but not wanting to get more points taken off for lateness, he was astonished by the quality of my writing, and emailed me to tell me that he was confused by my claims to have struggled with the assignment, because my paper was easily the best out of the class. I found this unsurprising; he must have developed low standards for the papers his students would turn in, because his expectations for volume and content were completely out of synch.
That’s funny. I had the opposite experience. In High School I just learned how to pad things out, and in college everything was actually sensible-length assignments.
In that case, I envy you your coursework.
I find I get downvoted for calling a fool a fool approximately 33% of the time.