I’m sitting at the laptop instead of making lunch or making tea and my nails start to hurt because I should trim them and when I type with slightly longer nails I keep bumping them and after a while they hurt. People with long nails must be using their keyboards in a very different way. No finger nose-diving!
I was reading a post by @Sandra where she writes about her writing style:
Sometimes I think I should make a writing style guide for the sole purposes of communicating that some of my style decisions are deliberate … – Writing Style Guide
As for myself, I teethgnashingly write more “I think”, “for me”, “it seems to me” and so on, on my own blog no less, because I kept getting pushback from people commenting on my blog arguing with me that the things I said are not universally true, which seems super obvious to me because I am writing on my blog. Grrrrr.
Perhaps I hear my words in my own voice, see myself sitting in a coffee house with friends, and we don’t qualify every statement. Those qualifications are implied by the simple fact that we are people talking to each other.
Other people are probably hearing those words like they read the newspaper. “News” is supposedly “universally true” or aims to be. I think. Hah!
On the other hand, with the pandemic clearly illustrating how simple minded many people are, and having realised that for me as a person who is not writing manuals, instructions, nor working in public relations, as a journalist, or for the government, and being super simple to understand not being a top priority (for me!), I have started writing more in the style that I hear my inner voice using. Longer sentences, relative clauses, extensions, a dialectical back and forth, looking for a rhythm, a flow, often getting a wall of text, using made up words – all of this in a vague attempt to lift people up.
Perhaps reaching the masses does not happen via short articles with digestible quotes and nice headlines, subtitles, bold keywords, cat pictures, or any other kind of pictures. All we do is to train people that reading the headlines and the first handful of words in a search engine result page is probably good enough. – A comment of mine on the Wall of Text page
A comment of mine on the Wall of Text page
I expect more reading comprehension and I don’t want to talk down to people – I don’t want to assume people are barely literate. Since I cannot have both at the same time, or perhaps because I’m not good enough, I’m opting for harder to understand but hopefully better, or more authentically mine, perhaps being as delusional as many failed authors. Oh well.
Ironically, I don’t usually enjoy reading long walls of text on other blogs or in books. Perhaps because we’ve been trained for instant gratification, for attention deficiency, an inability to focus. The irony is not lost on me. At the same time, I see this as a call to action. How come we have lost the ability to read difficult texts? How come I have lost this? Hah! Preempting you, dear reader. I say “we” because I feel I’m not alone. If you have come to tell me “not all readers…” I guess I just don’t care. I’d be interested in your own experience, however. But just to finish that thought where I am confronted with long blog posts on other sites: sometimes I’ll stop reading because they are boring. But sometimes I’ll read them, so I know that it’s possible to write well. I want to be a better writer, and therefore, after having mastered the dry and precise manual writing style, I’m trying to explore the long and rambling style.
#Blogs
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I have started writing more in the style that I hear my inner voice using
Good!
– Lexie 2022-07-06 11:37 UTC
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Part of writing, I think, is being accurate in what you say. Saying “People are”, or “People do”, is not precise and can be ambiguous in English, meaning either “All people are” or “Some people are” or sometimes even “These people are”. That is not to say that accuracy is easy - it is definitely not. It’s a balancing act between accuracy and understandableness. (I was originally planning on writing this as “You have to balance between ...”, but it’s less forceful and condescending the other way, which is yet another consideration)
– Krixano 2022-07-06 18:53 UTC
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Finding and sticking to your voice as a writer is hard. I have struggled with these same issues, good for you.
– ChrisQ 2022-07-06 19:41 UTC
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I’m not sure about accuracy. Isn’t that the mindset of the manual writer? The argument regarding precision and qualifications seems like it’s drawing an arbitrary line. “People” does not mean *all* people, of course. There’s always questions about who we are talking about. Are we talking about the living right now, today, or the general population, and where are these people, are they here where I live, in Switzerland? Or are they in the USA, where many readers live? What about their other attributes, their skin colours, their sexual orientation, their political allegiances, and all the other factors that people these days think are important identifiers.
The struggle is real, of course, but not everything needs to be part of the struggle, the Culture War that is consuming us, stopping us from saving the planet. Who is some of us? Only the Republicans in the USA? Only the Republicans in the USA ever since Bush? Reagan? Nixon? People with big cars? Any cars? Meat eaters? The people remain as elusive as ever.
I agree that we need to be careful with words, we don’t want to hurt people, and I agree that there’s violence in words. At the same time, reading is a perilous act, and it is up to the reader to contextualise the words, to practice reading with humility and good intentions. If you’re Cardinal Richelieu from fiction you can always take a few lines “written by the hand of the most honest of men” and find something to hang them with. I guess he wouldn’t have minded if honest men stopped writing. But this is not the outcome I want.
It seems to me that accuracy will always be eluding us. Using more precise wording just makes us unable to speak at all.
The book deals with the problems of philosophy, and shows, I believe, that the reason why these problems are posed is that the logic of our language is misunderstood. The whole sense of the book might be summed up in the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence. – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein
This is from the preface in Pears/McGuinness translation.
Perhaps the solution is to simply drop the pretence of philosophy and concede that all these words are not coherent. It would let me write with imprecision.
So yes, it can be a balancing act between accuracy and understandability, but understandability has many facets and that needs to wait for another day. 😀
– Alex 2022-07-07 13:49 UTC
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I recently highlighted my writing process on my blog (https://taonaw.com/2022-06-08/). I want to focus on one part that relates here.
https://taonaw.com/2022-06-08/
My writing in my journal is different from the blog. I’ve head two different “voices” of writing for as long as I was writing blogs, which is a long time.
My journal writing is flowing. It’s in the form of “walls of text” as you experience here, with additional comments and phrases that don’t make sense to others. Like you, I speak more than one language, so sometimes I’d use a phrase or a word that makes sense to me in another language.
The key is the purpose of the writing. In my journal, I’m trying to capture as much personal experience as I can. I like to link other tasks as well, to “anchor” my entry to other things I’ve done that day. I also try to include pictures, and I have a script that resizes them and places them in my journal images folder. For the blog, I tell stories. The posts tend to have an introduction (sometimes I write this one last, as a summary, and move it to the top of the text). The posts in the journal go through a basic grammar and spelling check, something I don’t bother with in my journal. Finally, (but important to point out), some of my blog posts remain as drafts and never get published because they are too personal (so they don’t really relate to anyone) or don’t have a clear point to pass on.
You could say it’s all about editing, and perhaps even my blog is a bit more “fake” and not personal, but I’d argue that if you enjoy writing, your personality shows through anyway. We all have different voices, even when we’re only addressing ourselves.
...Or maybe it’s just me? Hmm.
– JTR 2022-07-08 12:01 UTC
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I definitely have noticed that my attention span and ability to concentrate on a long text has dropped massively since my teens. The number of books that I read each year has dropped constantly since 2010 at least (I didn’t keep records before), and I realize that I keep switching from one browser tab to the next before I’m done reading. I blame Internet (for infinite things to see) and smartphones (for instant access to those things).
As for readability, I think you’re doing well!
– Enzo 2022-07-09 06:32 UTC
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The Internet has changed our reading habits, perhaps. One data point against this is that I recently read an estimated 1200 pages of a series of novels.
I have two possible explanations: first, the books of my youth now seem predictable, their plots often foreseeable, iterations over the ideas I know. Second, around forty my eyesight started deteriorating and I didn’t notice. Reading simply got associated with a slight headache and being tired. Even now, when I finally realized what had happened and I now have the reading glasses I need, I am unhappy – I have still not adjusted, my head needs to move sideways to keep the words in focus, it’s disorienting to look up, and so on. That really gnaws on my will to read.
Except for those novels I recently read. That showed me that with the right books, it can still work.
– Alex 2022-07-09 06:52 UTC
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Well, if a reader can’t fully understand what you are writing, then you’re not conveying what you want to convey. It’s easy to say readers should properly “contextualize” everything, but in reality, it’s impossible for every human being to know every single context ever - which is why it’s the job of the author to know who their audience is and to convey the right information for that audience. Knowing what you need to mention and what you don’t need to mention, and when you mention it, is an important skill just as much as accuracy, understandability (simplicity, etc.), and many other things. Vague words just seem to be one of the more common things in writing.
– Krixano 2022-07-17 10:12 UTC
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I think what you are saying applies first and foremost to technical writing. I’m not sure about other literary genres and strongly suspect that it doesn’t always apply. The law is often written in vague terms because it is expected that judges interpret it in actual cases based on changing circumstances. Poems are vague and rely on work on the reader’s part. Plays are limited in their stage directions in order to make space for arrangements, costumes, and all that. Novels rely on reader empathy, reader experience.
– Alex 2022-07-17 23:28 UTC
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As for myself, I teethgnashingly write more “I think”, “for me”, “it seems to me” and so on, on my own blog no less, because I kept getting pushback from people commenting on my blog arguing with me that the things I said are not universally true, which seems super obvious to me because I am writing on my blog. Grrrrr.
Atleast part of this could stem from an subconscious tendency to idolise and/or ’follow’ (which is promoted nowadays in one way or the other on most social media platforms), in parallel with wanting to ’compete’ or find flaws in the person you do follow in order to feel better about your own deficiencies. Sometimes though, a strongly stated opinion can naturally come across as a ’universal’ statement and saying ’I think’ can remind people that they are entitled to, and encouraged to form and maybe share their own opinions as well.
There is also something to be said about the benefits of re-reading, which show the same text in an entirely different light at a different point in time. (Whether any blog post is ever re-read or not!)
I wonder though - is it that we’re trained for instant gratification, or something like the opposite, as in - even if you take the effort to digest and ’accurately’ summarise or ’convey the concepts’ of a long, complex text for the benefit of others (and atleast partially yourself) - How often does anybody care or does it change anything? This feels convoluted too as perhaps one should also consider how your own expectations of appreciation play no small role, and that it is impossible to truly control the thoughts and emotions of readers - which makes me wonder - maybe one should just write for the sake of writing, and conveying thoughts ’clearly’, mercilessly edit, and freely experiment with that purpose in mind.. and just ’let go’.
– shreyas 2022-07-23 20:46 UTC
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I’m definitely of the opinion that some of my writing is actually “writing to learn”. I treat my wiki as me leaving notes for my future self and only incidentally for others. All those Administration posts are surely almost useless to anybody but me. Even I rarely end up on other people’s blogs when I have a technical problem and search online for a solution. It’s always one of the StackOverflow sites, or sometimes, less confidence inspiringly, on old forums. These sites act as search engine magnets and so people end up there if they have a new problem.
I sometimes do go back to old blog posts – not often to rewrite completely, but to fix typos, or fix mistakes, mostly to add more links and comments much later. All of this does not end up on the feed. For most visitors, these changes are invisible, and thus for me only.
The comments are only visible on the list of changes, no on the front page.
I like the point you make about adding “I think” in order to “remind people that they are entitled to, and encouraged to form and maybe share their own opinions as well.” That’s a good point that might help me appreciate the toning down of my own blog posts. 😅
– Alex 2022-07-23 21:59 UTC