I agree with your conclusion (this is a worthwhile pursuit), but I have some qualms.
There are a couple of general points that I think really need to be addressed before most of the individual points on this list can be considered seriously:
Following a list of prescriptions and proscriptions is a really poor way to learn any complex skill. A bad writer who earnestly tries to follow all the advice on this list will almost certainly still be bad at writing. I think the absolute best, most important advice to give to an aspiring writer is to write. A lot.
What constitutes “good” writing is a matter of taste. As with other aesthetic endeavors, it’s practically impossible to write tasteful prose if you don’t have taste in reading prose. I don’t see any real way to develop taste without reading a lot, and paying attention to what you’re reading and how it’s written.
To some extent I think every person has to pick apart writing that they think is good and figure out for themselves the nuts and bolts of good writing. The resulting insights might be temptingly easy to distill into bullet points, but this is a very leaky process of abstraction. Most of the value of these insights isn’t really communicated in the summary, but is in the data in your brain that made these patterns obvious to you. It’s the A Monad is Like a Burrito problem.
Compounding the issue of taste, there’s the problem that “good writing” is an underspecified term. There are a lot of extremely popular and wealthy authors whose writing isn’t considered “good,” at least by those who seem to have taste. Is popularity orthogonal to “good”? Should our goal even be “good,” then? Or is maximal popularity not, in fact, our goal? I have no idea what the answers to these questions should be. Would I rather write like Nabokov than like Dan Brown? Yes. Would that be instrumentally useful in spreading my ideas (or ideas that I like) as widely as possible? I don’t know. Possibly not.
I have a few comments about specific points on your list, but I’ll split those into other comments.
A bad writer who earnestly tries to follow all the advice on this list will almost certainly still be bad at writing. I think the absolute best, most important advice to give to an aspiring writer is to write. A lot.
My central objection is that this feels like a very un-LessWrongish way to approach a problem. A grab bag of unrelated and unsourced advice is what I might expect to see on the average blog.
Not only is there basically no analysis of what we’re trying to do and why, but the advice is a mixed bag. If one entry on the list completely dominates most of the others in terms of effectiveness (and is a prerequisite to putting the others to good use), I don’t expect it to be presented as just another member of the list. A few other entries on the list I consider to be questionable advice or based on mistaken assumptions.
Upon reread I fear this comes across as much harsher criticism than I intend it to be, because I really do think this is one of the most valuable skills to be cultivated. It’s also a thorny problem that attracts a lot of bullshit, being particularly vulnerable to generalization from one example. I’m glad Lukeprog posted this.
My central objection is that this feels like a very un-LessWrongish way to approach a problem. A grab bag of unrelated and unsourced advice is what I might expect to see on the average blog.
Allow me to introduce you to the Sequences, which have been called out many times for being unsourced, rambling, and pointless, and yet they kept chugging away.
I agree with your conclusion (this is a worthwhile pursuit), but I have some qualms.
There are a couple of general points that I think really need to be addressed before most of the individual points on this list can be considered seriously:
Following a list of prescriptions and proscriptions is a really poor way to learn any complex skill. A bad writer who earnestly tries to follow all the advice on this list will almost certainly still be bad at writing. I think the absolute best, most important advice to give to an aspiring writer is to write. A lot.
What constitutes “good” writing is a matter of taste. As with other aesthetic endeavors, it’s practically impossible to write tasteful prose if you don’t have taste in reading prose. I don’t see any real way to develop taste without reading a lot, and paying attention to what you’re reading and how it’s written. To some extent I think every person has to pick apart writing that they think is good and figure out for themselves the nuts and bolts of good writing. The resulting insights might be temptingly easy to distill into bullet points, but this is a very leaky process of abstraction. Most of the value of these insights isn’t really communicated in the summary, but is in the data in your brain that made these patterns obvious to you. It’s the A Monad is Like a Burrito problem.
Compounding the issue of taste, there’s the problem that “good writing” is an underspecified term. There are a lot of extremely popular and wealthy authors whose writing isn’t considered “good,” at least by those who seem to have taste. Is popularity orthogonal to “good”? Should our goal even be “good,” then? Or is maximal popularity not, in fact, our goal? I have no idea what the answers to these questions should be. Would I rather write like Nabokov than like Dan Brown? Yes. Would that be instrumentally useful in spreading my ideas (or ideas that I like) as widely as possible? I don’t know. Possibly not.
I have a few comments about specific points on your list, but I’ll split those into other comments.
I believe that was one of the rules on the list.
My central objection is that this feels like a very un-LessWrongish way to approach a problem. A grab bag of unrelated and unsourced advice is what I might expect to see on the average blog.
Not only is there basically no analysis of what we’re trying to do and why, but the advice is a mixed bag. If one entry on the list completely dominates most of the others in terms of effectiveness (and is a prerequisite to putting the others to good use), I don’t expect it to be presented as just another member of the list. A few other entries on the list I consider to be questionable advice or based on mistaken assumptions.
Upon reread I fear this comes across as much harsher criticism than I intend it to be, because I really do think this is one of the most valuable skills to be cultivated. It’s also a thorny problem that attracts a lot of bullshit, being particularly vulnerable to generalization from one example. I’m glad Lukeprog posted this.
Allow me to introduce you to the Sequences, which have been called out many times for being unsourced, rambling, and pointless, and yet they kept chugging away.