For me, as someone who’s lurked off and on for a few years and only started regularly commenting recently, I find this whole place terribly intimidating. Everyone else is far smarter than me and I am used to being the smartest person in every room, and it’s quite painful and makes it hard to interact. It’s some of the best writing I’ve ever read on the internet… but that may be a bad thing, as it’s an impossible threshold to climb over as a newbie.
I used to be the smartest person in the room and it felt lonely. Also, it felt like some problems are never going to be fixed, because I am unable to fix them, and other people are often unable to even see them.
The content on LW is not graded on a curve. There is some noise in the karma feedback, but generally, as long as your writing avoids certain mistakes, the response is neutral or positive.
In addition to Raemon’s suggestion, I would add that keeping a daily, personal, diary, if you haven’t already, is vital to the developmental process in understanding how to best organize your own thoughts. Or so I’ve observed.
Been doing that for years. My thoughts are still ill-organized. It’s something about how my brain works. Attention deficit plus a dearth of memory = I don’t have a bird’s eye view of my own mind, and I rely on intuition (trained on details I can no longer remember) to tell me what to think, after which I have to try to figure out why I feel that xyz thing is true (that is, what experiences in the past trained that intuition) before I can determine whether to trust it or not. Almost none of my cognition is rooted in any kind of analytical reasoning. I just have to make it look like it is in order to communicate with others.
If you constantly re-read past entries and try to improve on clarity, conciseness, and perceptive depth with every new entry I think you will eventually improve your writing skills. It just takes effort and persistence to do so, even on the days when self-reflection appear unbearably painful.
For me, as someone who’s lurked off and on for a few years and only started regularly commenting recently, I find this whole place terribly intimidating. Everyone else is far smarter than me and I am used to being the smartest person in every room, and it’s quite painful and makes it hard to interact. It’s some of the best writing I’ve ever read on the internet… but that may be a bad thing, as it’s an impossible threshold to climb over as a newbie.
You might try using the shortform feature to get some ideas out in a less intense setting.
I used to be the smartest person in the room and it felt lonely. Also, it felt like some problems are never going to be fixed, because I am unable to fix them, and other people are often unable to even see them.
The content on LW is not graded on a curve. There is some noise in the karma feedback, but generally, as long as your writing avoids certain mistakes, the response is neutral or positive.
I’m usually the dumbest person in the room and I still post occasionally.
Hmm. Well, this could imply you’re smarter than me, as a truly smart person would surround themself with other people smarter still :P
In addition to Raemon’s suggestion, I would add that keeping a daily, personal, diary, if you haven’t already, is vital to the developmental process in understanding how to best organize your own thoughts. Or so I’ve observed.
Been doing that for years. My thoughts are still ill-organized. It’s something about how my brain works. Attention deficit plus a dearth of memory = I don’t have a bird’s eye view of my own mind, and I rely on intuition (trained on details I can no longer remember) to tell me what to think, after which I have to try to figure out why I feel that xyz thing is true (that is, what experiences in the past trained that intuition) before I can determine whether to trust it or not. Almost none of my cognition is rooted in any kind of analytical reasoning. I just have to make it look like it is in order to communicate with others.
If you constantly re-read past entries and try to improve on clarity, conciseness, and perceptive depth with every new entry I think you will eventually improve your writing skills. It just takes effort and persistence to do so, even on the days when self-reflection appear unbearably painful.