martes, 10 de noviembre de 2020

On Writing

I've lately been a bit interested in writing style. The triggers were a couple of things:

1) People in my $ENV abusing extremely indirect-passive I-am-not-that-involved I-dont-give-many-fucks-but-I-talk-academically-to-seem-that-at-least-I-am-thoghtful.  Yes, the problem probably lies in me, but I digress.

2) I discovered this writing plain English. This page is short, to the point, and I found it amazing that you can apply 99% of it to programming, and behaving, and many planes of your daily life. It caused a big impact. It's like a Fowler's article masked as an English writing guide.

Then "The Internet" started throwing links and videos at me about writing effectively, like this Steven Pinker one, or this other one aimed at academics writing articles, but with interesting insights from the University of Chicago. Also, did you know that George Orwell has a very cited text on English style? I didn't. But it's cool.

So, I haven't read 'The Elements of Style' or plan to (for now), but I can recommend all 4 links here. You can ingest them in a single day, with your non-tech-geek SO, and have thoughtful discussions. Long term, if something sticks, great.  Else, you write a blogpost about those links so you can reference and reread them later on. :)

Addendum: https://www.julian.com/guide/write/intro looks like good advice also

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