I’ll be honest, I can’t engage with some lesswrong posts because of the endless hedging, introspection and over specifying. The healthy desire to be clear and rational can become like a compulsion, one that’s actually very demanding of the reader’s time and patience. The truth is, one could clarify, quantify and ‘go meta’ on any step in any argument for untold thousands of words. So you have to decide where to stop and where to expand. This sort of strategic restraint is at the core of good writing style.
So while I can agree that the classic style may be unsuitable for many purposes when carried to an extreme, you have to decide where your communications fit on a scale. The opposite of writing everything in a fully classic style is a world where every piece of writing about anything becomes endless throat clearing and philosophising.
Writing can definitely be overly “self-aware” sometimes (trust me I know!) but “classic style” is waaaayyy too restrictive.
My rule of thumb would be:
Write sentences that are maximally informative to your reader.
If you know that ϕ and you expect that the reader’s beliefs about the subject matter would significantly change if they also knew ϕ, then write that ϕ.
This will include sentences about the document and the author — rather than just the subject.
I don’t think people do all the hedging because they think it would be informative. That’s the problem. The policy of advocating classic style is that people are either bad at using meta-discourse well, or they’re unconsciously using it in pursuit of a goal other than being maximally informative. By eliminating it and sticking with classic style, the writer comes closer to being maximally informative in most cases.
I’ll be honest, I can’t engage with some lesswrong posts because of the endless hedging, introspection and over specifying. The healthy desire to be clear and rational can become like a compulsion, one that’s actually very demanding of the reader’s time and patience. The truth is, one could clarify, quantify and ‘go meta’ on any step in any argument for untold thousands of words. So you have to decide where to stop and where to expand. This sort of strategic restraint is at the core of good writing style.
So while I can agree that the classic style may be unsuitable for many purposes when carried to an extreme, you have to decide where your communications fit on a scale. The opposite of writing everything in a fully classic style is a world where every piece of writing about anything becomes endless throat clearing and philosophising.
Writing can definitely be overly “self-aware” sometimes (trust me I know!) but “classic style” is waaaayyy too restrictive.
My rule of thumb would be:
Write sentences that are maximally informative to your reader.
If you know that ϕ and you expect that the reader’s beliefs about the subject matter would significantly change if they also knew ϕ, then write that ϕ.
This will include sentences about the document and the author — rather than just the subject.
I don’t think people do all the hedging because they think it would be informative. That’s the problem. The policy of advocating classic style is that people are either bad at using meta-discourse well, or they’re unconsciously using it in pursuit of a goal other than being maximally informative. By eliminating it and sticking with classic style, the writer comes closer to being maximally informative in most cases.