Your audience chose to read you for some reason. Maybe you had a catchy title. Maybe someone they liked recommended you. Maybe the algorithm placed your post in front of their eyes while they sat there drooling and immobile. They had some hope that reading you would be mildly more interesting than the alternative. That’s your runway. It will last a few sentences to a few paragraphs before they drift off. Don’t waste your first few paragraphs defining something everyone already knows the definition of, or telling a rambling story about why you decided to write this.
I wish he’d given some common failure modes and ways to fix them. Like I completely agree with the main point, but without concrete examples, I have a hard time applying this advice to my own writing except for “try harder dingus” which is often unhelpful.
Ooh very interesting. I fall for throat-clearing a lot myself. I do think it’s kinda hard to avoid context and overview, though, and intros can be nice stylistically? But maybe this is just me making excuses for my bad habits...
I wonder how much of that is because speaking is different than writing. In some situations, people interrupt each other, so if you don’t start with the disclaimer and move to the interesting part instead, that gives an opportunity to someone else to steal your spotlight by making those disclaimers for you.
I also wonder how much context plays into this. In normal life, I usually don’t assume that my conversation partner knows what I’m talking about, so I try to give as much context as I think necessary for them to understand. On the internet you can sometimes just write for people who already know what you’re talking about.
From Scott Alexander’s recent post (13: Runway):
I wish he’d given some common failure modes and ways to fix them. Like I completely agree with the main point, but without concrete examples, I have a hard time applying this advice to my own writing except for “try harder dingus” which is often unhelpful.
See also
Ooh very interesting. I fall for throat-clearing a lot myself. I do think it’s kinda hard to avoid context and overview, though, and intros can be nice stylistically? But maybe this is just me making excuses for my bad habits...
I wonder how much of that is because speaking is different than writing. In some situations, people interrupt each other, so if you don’t start with the disclaimer and move to the interesting part instead, that gives an opportunity to someone else to steal your spotlight by making those disclaimers for you.
I also wonder how much context plays into this. In normal life, I usually don’t assume that my conversation partner knows what I’m talking about, so I try to give as much context as I think necessary for them to understand. On the internet you can sometimes just write for people who already know what you’re talking about.