I don’t know exactly what the LW norms are around plagiarism and plagiarism-ish things, but I think that introducing that basically-copied material with
I learned this by observing how beginners and more experienced people approach improv comedy.
is outright dishonest. OP is claiming to have observed this phenomenon and gleaned insight from it, when in fact he read about it in someone else’s book and copied it into his post.
I have strong-downvoted the post for this reason alone (though, full disclosure, I also find the one-sentence-per-paragraph style really annoying and that may have influenced my decision[1]) and will not find it easy to trust anything else I see from this author.
[1] It feels to me as if the dishonest appropriation of someone else’s insight and the annoying style may not be completely unrelated. One reason why I find this style annoying is that it gives me the strong impression of someone who is optimizing for sounding good. This sort of style—punchy sentences, not too much complexity in how they relate to one another, the impression of degree of emphasis on every sentence—feels like a public speaking style to me, and when I see someone writing this way I can’t shake the feeling that someone is trying to manipulate me, to oversimplfy things to make them more likely to lodge in the brain, etc. And stealing other people’s ideas and pretending they’re your own is also a thing people do when they are optimizing for sounding good. (Obviously everything in this footnote is super-handwavy and unfair.)
In case anyone is in doubt about abstractapplic’s accusation, I’ve checked. The relevant passage is near the end of section 3 of the chapter entitled “Spontaneity”; in my copy it’s on page 88. I’m not sure “almost verbatim” is quite right, but the overall claim being made is the same, “fried mermaid” and “fish” are both there, and “will desperately try to think up something original” is taken verbatim from Johnstone.
I don’t know exactly what the LW norms are around plagiarism and plagiarism-ish things, but I think that introducing that basically-copied material with
is outright dishonest. OP is claiming to have observed this phenomenon and gleaned insight from it, when in fact he read about it in someone else’s book and copied it into his post.
I have strong-downvoted the post for this reason alone (though, full disclosure, I also find the one-sentence-per-paragraph style really annoying and that may have influenced my decision[1]) and will not find it easy to trust anything else I see from this author.
[1] It feels to me as if the dishonest appropriation of someone else’s insight and the annoying style may not be completely unrelated. One reason why I find this style annoying is that it gives me the strong impression of someone who is optimizing for sounding good. This sort of style—punchy sentences, not too much complexity in how they relate to one another, the impression of degree of emphasis on every sentence—feels like a public speaking style to me, and when I see someone writing this way I can’t shake the feeling that someone is trying to manipulate me, to oversimplfy things to make them more likely to lodge in the brain, etc. And stealing other people’s ideas and pretending they’re your own is also a thing people do when they are optimizing for sounding good. (Obviously everything in this footnote is super-handwavy and unfair.)
In case anyone is in doubt about abstractapplic’s accusation, I’ve checked. The relevant passage is near the end of section 3 of the chapter entitled “Spontaneity”; in my copy it’s on page 88. I’m not sure “almost verbatim” is quite right, but the overall claim being made is the same, “fried mermaid” and “fish” are both there, and “will desperately try to think up something original” is taken verbatim from Johnstone.