Oh hey, I'm the person mentioned in the first sentence of this post. I was wondering why my stats went up today!
I've published a blog post every weekday for over a year now (today's was #280). It's been life changing for me. It's now my go-to method for figuring out what I think about something and for crystallizing those thoughts and finding links between them.
- I figured out that I wanted a new job while writing a blog post (and I started that new job 9 months ago).
- I learned that I'm not an introvert, but rather a shy extrovert, while writing a blog post.
- That led into me realizing I have social anxiety while writing a blog post.
There are lots more examples of that. I'm often surprised to find that I don't actually believe what I thought I believed when I started writing that blog post.
Journaling never stuck for me because it felt like work, but making it public made it exciting and fulfilling enough to become a habit that I look forward to each day.
I've lately been contemplating whether writing shorter content regularly is better than writing long thoughtful content once in a while. Your work gives some motivation.
I have some questions,
1. How do you differentiating writing short content on social media vs your blog, Because If I have anything short to communicate I do so HN, Twitter, Reddit and so If I have to write about it again on my blog it feels bit disingenuous.
I saw your twitter handle and it looks like you're using just for broadcasting your content? Aren't you worried that you'd be caught in a bubble? Social media for what it's worth are good source for counter thought, Though often it's in the form of harsh criticisms.
2. SEO: How are the Search Engines treating your blogs for the small content length? I see that my long writes have been favored by the search engines. Did you see having images/videos in your content making difference?
3. Would you like to reveal your opening rates of your newsletter email? I'm curious whether shorter content results in decent open rates(While the average industry rate for newsletter is abysmal, Yet I do recommend everyone to have their own newsletter as it's the only thing which can save your blog if the Search Engine gods decides to shadow ban. Federated email for the win again!)
> I learned that I'm not an introvert, but rather a shy extrovert
Fun, I recently had the same revelation while driving. I realized that making new social connections or talking in public was frightening, but that I had no problem anymore overcoming those fears, and that they were fears, not something that defines me as an introvert.
I don't remember the original source, but in Leslie Lamport's Specifying Systems book, he quoted someone saying "Writing is nature's way of telling you how sloppy your thinking is."
Generally, if you're writing long, rambling posts, there's a good chance that your understanding of the subject that you're writing about is sloppy (not to say you don't understand it, just that your thoughts are all over the place). If you can express what you're writing in a fairly short amount of time, you probably have a relatively good mental model of what it is you're tying to say, and this is a learnable (and useful) skill.
I've found that getting into the practice of writing "notes that I will actually read in the future" has helped a lot with this.
I strongly disagree. A person who loves to read pop sci physics will be much better at writing clear sentences about physics than a physicist, but the physicist will for sure have a better understanding of physics.
The world is very complex and almost nothing in it can accurately be summarised in a short piece of writing. Being able to making decent summaries is useful but it doesn't show mastery of the subject nor does being unable to do so show lack of mastery. Rather many masters feels that the summaries are woefully inaccurate and therefore be unable to write them while many amateurs will make very clear summaries of fields they understand nothing about.
I've noticed what often causes rambling is writing a sentence that I'm only 50% sure conveys the idea. I'll keep writing variations of the same core sentence in the hope that one of them will work for the reader.
The thought is clear in my head, but doesn't seem clear on paper. So I just throw a bunch of word spaghetti at the wall and hope something sticks. It's better to tighten up one really clear sentence, and accept any complex thought will probably go over the heads of some percent of the readers.
To brag a little, my favorite feedback on the newsletters I send is "Thanks! Short and sweet, loved it!" to a 1000 word email.
It's okay to write long. But it needs to feel short by being concise.
You can always tell when someone squeezes a 1000 page book into 200 pages. It feels short and insightful. But when they expand a 20 page book into 200 pages, it feels like fluff. You can tell when that happens too.
A good pattern to observe is an author's first and second best seller.
The first is often amazing. A decade of lessons and insights squeezed into a book. The fast followup is usually fluff. 2 years of add-ons expanded into a full book.
There's some truth to the idea. At the same time, I've met plenty of experts who are competent and productive in their work, but incapable of concise communication.
If you sieve through their rambling, you'll notice that they do have a mental model. The problem is that the model is very foreign to other minds, and they do a poor job describing it.
This might be the reason that some people are more comfortable communicating with formulas than verbal descriptions. They are eloquent when they don't have to come up with their own words.
"Generally, if you're writing long, rambling posts, there's a good chance that your understanding of the subject that you're writing about is sloppy "
I don't think that's true. Understanding something and being able to write about it are two different things. It's a good thing to learn to be concise though.
Good writing is often a very small subset of a topic. If you are an expert on a topic it can be very hard to omit a lot of detail you may find important but will just overload people.
Toastmasters taught me a lot about this. A lot of my speeches were 15 minutes long at first. Cutting them down to 5 minutes was very painful but it definitely made them way better
I think that no. Writing is separate skill. It has nothing to do how you internal thinking os nor whether it is sloppy.
It has a lot tondonwith whether you tried to learn writing, found good teachers or other resources. Learning to write won't make your thinking different, but you will be able to express things.
Just this morning my dyslexic friend said he loves to write in bullet points, because reading is very labor-intensive for him. He wished that articles would just give you the meat in bullet points instead of spreading the actual information out over several pages of fluff.
That made me realize, keeping dyslexic people in mind when writing is one of those things that improves accessibility for everyone.
I'll bite: I think your friend has a point, I take handwritten notes purely in nested bullets if the topic isn't an active conversation.
That said, this only works up to a point, and I wonder whether most articles could be written in bullets and retain all the "value" of their prose form. Bullets don't cut it if the subject requires the author to address human emotions or impart meaning into their text. This is loosely in opposition to facts, spec sheets, and technical information that does lend itself to hierarchical structures in a way that adds value.
I recognize you might not disagree with any of this, by the way.
Many of those articles aren't full of fluff because the authors don't know how to write concisely. They're full of fluff for other reasons, such as:
- The piece is written to make a good story, not to convey facts. I tend not to like these myself. But asking them to consist of bullet points would be like saying that Romeo and Juliet should consist of a bullet list of the plot points: it misses the point.
- It's SEO spam, or a submarine ad, or a blog post about something the author makes money on, or a post by Wolfram obstensively talking about one thing but actually mostly talking about how great Wolfram is, and the objective of the writer is best achieved if you spend a while reading it.
- It's a recipe. I don't know exactly what's going on, but judging by the effects there are some really weird incentives around online recipes.
For writing that actually aims to impart knowledge, agreed: bullet lists are great (even for non-dyslexic readers) and we should use more of them.
Not dyslexic, but I actively have to fight myself from writing in bullet points - both in personal and work contexts, and even on HN!
I found that when trying to communicate actual information, prose just gets in the way. Trees (aka. nested bullet points) map much better. Alas, most people are used to reading prose, so I'm forced to degrade the message to accommodate.
A few news sites do that, like Business Insider, and I think it's a great idea. They should also give tables of data in a standard format instead of saying 4/13ths of people agreed that is was likely or very likely, but only 20 disagreed.
Nice post, how do you like your Zettelcloud so far? I'm always interested to hear.
Looking at Mike's article:
> Because the shorter it is, the more people will read it.
What.
> Because of the Pareto principle: 80% of the value is in 20% of the length (hence “5x shorter”).
WHAT.
I guess a lot of us write so that other people will read...I guess.
But also, a lot of us write to exorcise our informational/emotional demons (to use a metaphor). It's taking care of oneself. And a lot of the time that looks like piles of words. Especially given a nice amount of intuition-stimulant like caffeine.
Writing/blogging has headed more this way for me personally, the longer I've been writing & blogging. But I also don't blog for leads or income anymore, and don't care as much about my audience dynamics. Is that where the cutoff is?
If somebody really wants the short version I find that they'll email me and probably get a disappointing reply...
> But also, a lot of us write to exorcise our informational/emotional demons (to use a metaphor). It's taking care of oneself. And a lot of the time that looks like piles of words.
I find in my old age that I have little patience for people who publicly write for themselves and not for others. If you want to masturbate, cool, I love it, do it in private. If you want to enrich others, the less you waste their time the more people you'll be able to reach.
I like terse writing but I’ve also learned two things about it. The first is that minimalist narrative writing linearizes nonlinear thought. The linearity is often—correctly or incorrectly—perceived as clarity but it really is just linearity. In some cases preserving nonlinearity is actually helpful (for instance, a conversation with interjections and meanderings). Second, terseness is not appreciated by all. Fillers and repetitions are sometimes necessary for politeness and to soften language. This is why you should strive to write more rather than less when what you’re about the say is liable to be misunderstood or if you want to emphasize something.
> Simple means getting rid of extra words. Don’t write, “He was very happy” when you can write “He was happy.” You think the word “very” adds something. It doesn’t. Prune your sentences.
It's a good rule of thumb to KISS (keep it short and simple), but it doesn't translate from one short and simplified example to each sentence of a longer text, because sentences aren't wholly individual. Sentences need to work together, in conjunction, because the information content requires a reasonable amount of structural complexity to support the content. Adverbs are very good at that.
I am absoluty not familiar with typed syntax theories or anything really, but I dare say the adverb in the previous sentence modifies at that. At least the parameter is bracketed nicely. Were I to say otherwise that Adverbs are good, it would not be any better now would it? Because the adverb introduces an adverbial clause that modifies the whole preceding text, that is referenced by "at that" in a manner of, err, a fix-point y-combinator!?
On the other hand I am a foreign speaker without good judgement. Consider that good (or happy) itself may be adverbial, Adverbs well support the support.
Good to know: Repition and redundancy can be quite beneficial, and sometimes it's impossible to avoid.
Anyway, kitchen philosophy says that early optimization is the source of all evil (Hoare apud Knuth).
Edit: Another problem of structural support is punctuation
That's still a skill I'm trying to get used to. For work emails, I've for some reason trained myself to add a bunch of fluff at the beginning and ending of emails.
For last ~year or so, I've been trying to get more into the habit of keeping my emails extremely utilitarian, e.g. bullets of my questions, bullets of what I need, and maybe the best way to get ahold of me.
This has been working for me. Before, I struggled to finish blog posts between working on other things. Now, for the last 100 days, I've been writing a short blog post every day.
I would say that "shorter" isn't the key. It just happens that when one writes "shorter" one tries to write in a more consice and structured manner. Not always, but typically.
Whereas whenever I see a long article, it's typically because the author decided to ramble about everything, nothing, and their dog, before they even get to anything remotely related to their point, by which point I've already lost the will to live. Not to mention I suspect they do this increase adspace, and then feel cheated I was tricked into clicking in the first space.
But a well reasoned argument need not be short to be effective. Orwell's essays do not need cliffnotes in order to be appreciated. CS Lewis does not need it.
So I would replace "short" with "intentional", "structured", "respectful" ... I think it just happens that it's easier to be unstructured and disrespectul during longer rants than it is with shorter ones.
Seemed like the blog post was more about note taking, but this ethos is why I like Twitter.
I realized that I have always enjoyed blogging. A medium that encourages terseness, has minimal friction to post, and provides a decently-sized audience lets me talk about my life in a way that makes me choose words more carefully.
The underlying problem is the clarity of one's writing. For inexperienced writers it's highly likely that the longer their writing the more rambling and incoherent it is. Therefore it's a good rule of thumb for an inexperienced writer to write shorter.
Simple ideas can be conveyed clearly and concisely.
Complex ideas need space to grow, roam, demonstrate, and explain. But more critically (and something Zettlekasten should help with significantly) they require structure. John McFee's description of his use of index cards is among the best (and most concise) explanations of this that I've found.
A classic bit of bad writing advice I see, at least for someone trying to express complex thoughts, is the idea that writing only or simply requires adding some fixed number of words per day. Write a uniform 3,000 words per day, and you'll crank out a 250,000 word epic novel in three months. It ... doesn't work like that. It's not that you can't simply keep stringing words together. But eventually that's going to show.
Simple structures are simple. A box, or hut, or short program, or simple essay, can be stream of consciousness or happenstance. A more complex structure with interdependencies, relationships, and constraints requires more thought, a framework off of which to hang the parts, and an overall organisation.
Short fragments can give you the parts you're looking for, but you'll still need to fit them together. And apply tape, string, and mortar where needed as well.
why is that bad writing advice? I would expect that consistently developing the writing every day (aka, 3000 words per day) will lead to some results - of course, you'd still have to edit, rearrange, and cut at some point in the future (e.g., after the "full" novel is completed, you'd go back and repeatedly change and cut, until it's a good novel).
A while back I got in trouble at work because I was perceived as being too direct in emails. IMO my mails were fine, and I varied the level of directness depending on the target audience - but others felt differently, so I started padding them out with fluff and niceties, and unfortunately it became a habit that I've found difficult to break.
And inevitably, some people have since said that my mails should come with a TL;DR! Sure enough, I feel like I used to be succinct, and now I'm just overly verbose, with redundant sentences, and sometimes seemingly rambling.
Hell, if you made it this far through this rambling comment, well done ;)
This advice is effective only if you are already famous or established. The most successful online writers who built their own brands without outside help began by writing huge, long articles that appealed to readers with high iqs and high attention spans. Short, concise articles are a dime a dozen and forgettable. You need to write looong essays to stand out and get content viral even if the articles are seldom read to thier entirety. An example is waitbutwhy.
The ultimate exaggeration of this would be a grand unified theory of everything. Maybe Stephen Wolfram will write it someday in the form of a cellular automata rule set.
Wolfram is working on another idea, based on graph rewriting. Which is perhaps like a cellular automata whose rules can create more cells instead of working on a fixed grid, but, at this point it's not "cellular" anymore.
Wolfram has an.. issue in that he focuses on qualitative results (he runs simulations, eyeball it and tell something about it), but, I'm pretty excited by this development.
Imo, write less, but longer. It allows you to better articulate your thoughts and create content that is in-depth, helpful and often timeless.
If you can't connect the beginning, middle and end of a single 3000 word article, why do you think you can do it with 5x 600 word ones? Same for video and audio.
Plus, "more and shorter" brought us the cancer that is Twitter, Facebook, Imgur and TikTok.
[+] [-] mcrittenden|4 years ago|reply
I've published a blog post every weekday for over a year now (today's was #280). It's been life changing for me. It's now my go-to method for figuring out what I think about something and for crystallizing those thoughts and finding links between them.
- I figured out that I wanted a new job while writing a blog post (and I started that new job 9 months ago).
- I learned that I'm not an introvert, but rather a shy extrovert, while writing a blog post.
- That led into me realizing I have social anxiety while writing a blog post.
There are lots more examples of that. I'm often surprised to find that I don't actually believe what I thought I believed when I started writing that blog post.
Journaling never stuck for me because it felt like work, but making it public made it exciting and fulfilling enough to become a habit that I look forward to each day.
Since the author mentioned Zettelkasten, I'll add this: https://critter.blog/2021/02/10/blogging-as-a-zettelkasten/
[+] [-] Abishek_Muthian|4 years ago|reply
I've lately been contemplating whether writing shorter content regularly is better than writing long thoughtful content once in a while. Your work gives some motivation.
I have some questions,
1. How do you differentiating writing short content on social media vs your blog, Because If I have anything short to communicate I do so HN, Twitter, Reddit and so If I have to write about it again on my blog it feels bit disingenuous.
I saw your twitter handle and it looks like you're using just for broadcasting your content? Aren't you worried that you'd be caught in a bubble? Social media for what it's worth are good source for counter thought, Though often it's in the form of harsh criticisms.
2. SEO: How are the Search Engines treating your blogs for the small content length? I see that my long writes have been favored by the search engines. Did you see having images/videos in your content making difference?
3. Would you like to reveal your opening rates of your newsletter email? I'm curious whether shorter content results in decent open rates(While the average industry rate for newsletter is abysmal, Yet I do recommend everyone to have their own newsletter as it's the only thing which can save your blog if the Search Engine gods decides to shadow ban. Federated email for the win again!)
[+] [-] charles_f|4 years ago|reply
Fun, I recently had the same revelation while driving. I realized that making new social connections or talking in public was frightening, but that I had no problem anymore overcoming those fears, and that they were fears, not something that defines me as an introvert.
[+] [-] DenisM|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tombert|4 years ago|reply
Generally, if you're writing long, rambling posts, there's a good chance that your understanding of the subject that you're writing about is sloppy (not to say you don't understand it, just that your thoughts are all over the place). If you can express what you're writing in a fairly short amount of time, you probably have a relatively good mental model of what it is you're tying to say, and this is a learnable (and useful) skill.
I've found that getting into the practice of writing "notes that I will actually read in the future" has helped a lot with this.
[+] [-] Jensson|4 years ago|reply
The world is very complex and almost nothing in it can accurately be summarised in a short piece of writing. Being able to making decent summaries is useful but it doesn't show mastery of the subject nor does being unable to do so show lack of mastery. Rather many masters feels that the summaries are woefully inaccurate and therefore be unable to write them while many amateurs will make very clear summaries of fields they understand nothing about.
[+] [-] dcolkitt|4 years ago|reply
The thought is clear in my head, but doesn't seem clear on paper. So I just throw a bunch of word spaghetti at the wall and hope something sticks. It's better to tighten up one really clear sentence, and accept any complex thought will probably go over the heads of some percent of the readers.
[+] [-] Swizec|4 years ago|reply
It's okay to write long. But it needs to feel short by being concise.
You can always tell when someone squeezes a 1000 page book into 200 pages. It feels short and insightful. But when they expand a 20 page book into 200 pages, it feels like fluff. You can tell when that happens too.
A good pattern to observe is an author's first and second best seller.
The first is often amazing. A decade of lessons and insights squeezed into a book. The fast followup is usually fluff. 2 years of add-ons expanded into a full book.
[+] [-] powersnail|4 years ago|reply
If you sieve through their rambling, you'll notice that they do have a mental model. The problem is that the model is very foreign to other minds, and they do a poor job describing it.
This might be the reason that some people are more comfortable communicating with formulas than verbal descriptions. They are eloquent when they don't have to come up with their own words.
[+] [-] sfg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spaetzleesser|4 years ago|reply
I don't think that's true. Understanding something and being able to write about it are two different things. It's a good thing to learn to be concise though.
Good writing is often a very small subset of a topic. If you are an expert on a topic it can be very hard to omit a lot of detail you may find important but will just overload people.
Toastmasters taught me a lot about this. A lot of my speeches were 15 minutes long at first. Cutting them down to 5 minutes was very painful but it definitely made them way better
[+] [-] gala8y|4 years ago|reply
https://web.archive.org/web/20160731175038/http://www.guindo...
I love this quote.
[+] [-] watwut|4 years ago|reply
It has a lot tondonwith whether you tried to learn writing, found good teachers or other resources. Learning to write won't make your thinking different, but you will be able to express things.
[+] [-] andai|4 years ago|reply
That made me realize, keeping dyslexic people in mind when writing is one of those things that improves accessibility for everyone.
[+] [-] DiggyJohnson|4 years ago|reply
That said, this only works up to a point, and I wonder whether most articles could be written in bullets and retain all the "value" of their prose form. Bullets don't cut it if the subject requires the author to address human emotions or impart meaning into their text. This is loosely in opposition to facts, spec sheets, and technical information that does lend itself to hierarchical structures in a way that adds value.
I recognize you might not disagree with any of this, by the way.
[+] [-] justinpombrio|4 years ago|reply
- The piece is written to make a good story, not to convey facts. I tend not to like these myself. But asking them to consist of bullet points would be like saying that Romeo and Juliet should consist of a bullet list of the plot points: it misses the point.
- It's SEO spam, or a submarine ad, or a blog post about something the author makes money on, or a post by Wolfram obstensively talking about one thing but actually mostly talking about how great Wolfram is, and the objective of the writer is best achieved if you spend a while reading it.
- It's a recipe. I don't know exactly what's going on, but judging by the effects there are some really weird incentives around online recipes.
For writing that actually aims to impart knowledge, agreed: bullet lists are great (even for non-dyslexic readers) and we should use more of them.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|4 years ago|reply
I found that when trying to communicate actual information, prose just gets in the way. Trees (aka. nested bullet points) map much better. Alas, most people are used to reading prose, so I'm forced to degrade the message to accommodate.
[+] [-] akvadrako|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] themodelplumber|4 years ago|reply
Looking at Mike's article:
> Because the shorter it is, the more people will read it.
What.
> Because of the Pareto principle: 80% of the value is in 20% of the length (hence “5x shorter”).
WHAT.
I guess a lot of us write so that other people will read...I guess.
But also, a lot of us write to exorcise our informational/emotional demons (to use a metaphor). It's taking care of oneself. And a lot of the time that looks like piles of words. Especially given a nice amount of intuition-stimulant like caffeine.
Writing/blogging has headed more this way for me personally, the longer I've been writing & blogging. But I also don't blog for leads or income anymore, and don't care as much about my audience dynamics. Is that where the cutoff is?
If somebody really wants the short version I find that they'll email me and probably get a disappointing reply...
[+] [-] BugsJustFindMe|4 years ago|reply
I find in my old age that I have little patience for people who publicly write for themselves and not for others. If you want to masturbate, cool, I love it, do it in private. If you want to enrich others, the less you waste their time the more people you'll be able to reach.
[+] [-] janto|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cpeterso|4 years ago|reply
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-aint-reading-all-that
[+] [-] wenc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcbishop|4 years ago|reply
Scott Adams https://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/06/the...
[+] [-] posterboy|4 years ago|reply
It's a good rule of thumb to KISS (keep it short and simple), but it doesn't translate from one short and simplified example to each sentence of a longer text, because sentences aren't wholly individual. Sentences need to work together, in conjunction, because the information content requires a reasonable amount of structural complexity to support the content. Adverbs are very good at that.
I am absoluty not familiar with typed syntax theories or anything really, but I dare say the adverb in the previous sentence modifies at that. At least the parameter is bracketed nicely. Were I to say otherwise that Adverbs are good, it would not be any better now would it? Because the adverb introduces an adverbial clause that modifies the whole preceding text, that is referenced by "at that" in a manner of, err, a fix-point y-combinator!?
On the other hand I am a foreign speaker without good judgement. Consider that good (or happy) itself may be adverbial, Adverbs well support the support.
Good to know: Repition and redundancy can be quite beneficial, and sometimes it's impossible to avoid.
Anyway, kitchen philosophy says that early optimization is the source of all evil (Hoare apud Knuth).
Edit: Another problem of structural support is punctuation
[+] [-] bserge|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blippage|4 years ago|reply
To take your example, don't say "he was very happy", but say something like "he was ecstatic".
[+] [-] cyberge99|4 years ago|reply
Interestingly, I heard it from some actor being interviewed on the Howard Stern show.
[+] [-] tombert|4 years ago|reply
For last ~year or so, I've been trying to get more into the habit of keeping my emails extremely utilitarian, e.g. bullets of my questions, bullets of what I need, and maybe the best way to get ahold of me.
[+] [-] rckrd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tpoacher|4 years ago|reply
Whereas whenever I see a long article, it's typically because the author decided to ramble about everything, nothing, and their dog, before they even get to anything remotely related to their point, by which point I've already lost the will to live. Not to mention I suspect they do this increase adspace, and then feel cheated I was tricked into clicking in the first space.
But a well reasoned argument need not be short to be effective. Orwell's essays do not need cliffnotes in order to be appreciated. CS Lewis does not need it.
So I would replace "short" with "intentional", "structured", "respectful" ... I think it just happens that it's easier to be unstructured and disrespectul during longer rants than it is with shorter ones.
[+] [-] tyingq|4 years ago|reply
https://critter.blog/2020/10/02/write-5x-more-but-write-5x-l...
[+] [-] OneEyedRobot|4 years ago|reply
I've decided to do all business correspondence as haiku from here on.
--------
Regarding your code
I would replace all the tabs
With happy faces
[+] [-] bserge|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Brendinooo|4 years ago|reply
I realized that I have always enjoyed blogging. A medium that encourages terseness, has minimal friction to post, and provides a decently-sized audience lets me talk about my life in a way that makes me choose words more carefully.
[+] [-] dgs_sgd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|4 years ago|reply
Simple ideas can be conveyed clearly and concisely.
Complex ideas need space to grow, roam, demonstrate, and explain. But more critically (and something Zettlekasten should help with significantly) they require structure. John McFee's description of his use of index cards is among the best (and most concise) explanations of this that I've found.
A classic bit of bad writing advice I see, at least for someone trying to express complex thoughts, is the idea that writing only or simply requires adding some fixed number of words per day. Write a uniform 3,000 words per day, and you'll crank out a 250,000 word epic novel in three months. It ... doesn't work like that. It's not that you can't simply keep stringing words together. But eventually that's going to show.
Simple structures are simple. A box, or hut, or short program, or simple essay, can be stream of consciousness or happenstance. A more complex structure with interdependencies, relationships, and constraints requires more thought, a framework off of which to hang the parts, and an overall organisation.
Short fragments can give you the parts you're looking for, but you'll still need to fit them together. And apply tape, string, and mortar where needed as well.
[+] [-] chii|4 years ago|reply
why is that bad writing advice? I would expect that consistently developing the writing every day (aka, 3000 words per day) will lead to some results - of course, you'd still have to edit, rearrange, and cut at some point in the future (e.g., after the "full" novel is completed, you'd go back and repeatedly change and cut, until it's a good novel).
[+] [-] GordonS|4 years ago|reply
And inevitably, some people have since said that my mails should come with a TL;DR! Sure enough, I feel like I used to be succinct, and now I'm just overly verbose, with redundant sentences, and sometimes seemingly rambling.
Hell, if you made it this far through this rambling comment, well done ;)
[+] [-] smoyer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kendru|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulpauper|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hirundo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nextaccountic|4 years ago|reply
Wolfram has an.. issue in that he focuses on qualitative results (he runs simulations, eyeball it and tell something about it), but, I'm pretty excited by this development.
https://www.wolframphysics.org/
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/04/the-wolfram-phys...
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-h...
[+] [-] bserge|4 years ago|reply
If you can't connect the beginning, middle and end of a single 3000 word article, why do you think you can do it with 5x 600 word ones? Same for video and audio.
Plus, "more and shorter" brought us the cancer that is Twitter, Facebook, Imgur and TikTok.