Is there any consensus about the “right” way to write a LW post? I see a lot of diversity in style, topic, and level of rigor in highly-voted posts. I certainly have no good way to tell if I’m doing it right; Michael Vassar doesn’t think so, but he’s never had a post voted as highly as my first one was. (Voting is not solely determined by post quality; this is a big part of the problem.)
I would certainly love to have a better way to get feedback than the current mechanisms; it’s indisputable that my writing could be better. Being able to workshop posts would be great, but I think it would be hard to find the right people to do the workshopping; off the top of my head I can really only think of a handful of posters I’d want to have doing that, and I get the impression that they’re all too busy. Maybe not, though.
Michael Vassar doesn’t think so, but he’s never had a post voted as highly as my first one was.
I didn’t think there was anything particularly wrong with your post, but newer posts get a much higher level of karma than old ones, which must be taken into account. Some of the core sequence posts have only 2 karma, for example.
I suppose there’s a few options including: See who’s willing to run workshops and then once that’s known, people can choose whether to join or not. If none of the top contributors could be convinced to run them then they may still be useful for people of a lower level of post writing ability (which I suspect is where I am, at the moment). The other thing is, even regardless of who ran the workshops, the ability to get faster feedback and to redraft gives a chance to develop an article more thoroughly before posting it properly and may give a sense of where improvements can be made and where the gaps in thinking and writing are.
But I guess that questions like that are secondary to the question of whether enough people think it’s a good enough idea and whether anyone would be willing to run workshops at all.
Is there any consensus about the “right” way to write a LW post? I see a lot of diversity in style, topic, and level of rigor in highly-voted posts. I certainly have no good way to tell if I’m doing it right; Michael Vassar doesn’t think so, but he’s never had a post voted as highly as my first one was. (Voting is not solely determined by post quality; this is a big part of the problem.)
I would certainly love to have a better way to get feedback than the current mechanisms; it’s indisputable that my writing could be better. Being able to workshop posts would be great, but I think it would be hard to find the right people to do the workshopping; off the top of my head I can really only think of a handful of posters I’d want to have doing that, and I get the impression that they’re all too busy. Maybe not, though.
(I think this is a great idea.)
I didn’t think there was anything particularly wrong with your post, but newer posts get a much higher level of karma than old ones, which must be taken into account. Some of the core sequence posts have only 2 karma, for example.
Agreed, and that is exactly the sort of factor I was alluding to in my parenthetical.
I suppose there’s a few options including: See who’s willing to run workshops and then once that’s known, people can choose whether to join or not. If none of the top contributors could be convinced to run them then they may still be useful for people of a lower level of post writing ability (which I suspect is where I am, at the moment). The other thing is, even regardless of who ran the workshops, the ability to get faster feedback and to redraft gives a chance to develop an article more thoroughly before posting it properly and may give a sense of where improvements can be made and where the gaps in thinking and writing are.
But I guess that questions like that are secondary to the question of whether enough people think it’s a good enough idea and whether anyone would be willing to run workshops at all.