On writing well (on the web)
2008-02-20 / 16:43 / dave
Steve Yegge’s posts always generate discussion. Unfortunately a lot of it looks like this:
he’s still a 2yo noob at writing, pointless overexplanation of every detail of his thought process. someday he’ll learn how adults write.
gsw07a, comment on Reddit
I don’t know how many of these comments Steve endures, but apparently enough that he wrote an article about why his long posts are popular. Conclusion: 1) because he’s a rebel and 2) it flushes your cache. Interesting, but I think he’s missing a key point: he’s entertaining. I mean “we have the Quality With a Name — namely, Suckiness.”? That’s just golden.
Most complaints point out that he could say the same thing in fewer words. I don’t doubt he could convey the same message–say, “static typing is dumb”–in fewer characters, but it wouldn’t have the same voice. Stevey is in no rush to get to the end and has a penchance for exaggeration. It’s like talking about programming with your friends. At a bar. If he were to have 15 pages of, say:
Static typing is inferior to dynamic typing for the following reasons:
1. Static typing requires system restart to change types
2. Static requires up-front design to avoid conflicting with the type-checker
3. Static typing is not a replacement for unit testing
…
It would be like having a discussion with that guy at work that no one really likes. That guy doesn’t have any friends which is why he spends his weekends memorizing the digits of pi.
Don’t be that guy
It’s easy to read blog posts and evaluate them as though they are computer programs[1]. They accomplish a task: teaching you something new. If that task can be accomplished in fewer tokens… great! Except reducing them to, say “don’t use static typing” is reductio ad absurdum. Unless you’re googling for “should I use static typing” this is pretty useless; it’s a simple recipe that teaches you nothing. Good teachers move beyond simple instruction to providing insight.
Great teachers are also entertaining. But being entertaining is hard. Thinking that you’re entertaining is often inversely correlated with success[2]. There’s also a thin line between entertaining and annoying, so if your style has a high variance you’re likely to just end up pissing-off a bunch of people.
The classic way to entertain with text is to be a good writer. Unfortunately, that’s hard to do: it takes lots of time to become a good writer and even more time to edit each work. And failing at writing can be worse than not trying: you end up boring and pompous.
The easy fall back is the one Steve adopts: use your own voice. At the very least it makes your writing authentic.
[1]: Well, if you’re a computer person.
[2]: Which explains this blog.
A tidbit on writing, the internet, and Paul Graham
Paul Graham seems to think his essays are delivered as informally as possible which makes me think he doesn’t read many other blogs and has never, ever been to something awful.