Comment by wcfrobert
17 hours ago
Completely agree! I find writing deeply memetic - in that I often catch myself imitating the flow, style, word choices, punctuation and grammar of whatever reading material I'm currently immersed in.
This unfortunately does not bode well for my writing ability as I read emails and Claude output all day. Recently, I've been reading a lot of building codes and compliance documents and I've develop annoying ticks like using "shall", "need not", "take no exception", overuse of passive voice, etc.
My hypothesis is engineers suck at writing by default unless they do extra-curricular reading. I read a lot! But sadly it's often textbooks, journal papers, documentations, and Claude. I'm envious of great writers, but I don't have time to read Keats. I'm immersed in Stewart, Strang, and whatever Claude is feeding me next.
> but I don't have time to read Keats.
T.R. Napper explicitly states that you do in his piece:
> But I am saying this: go look at your phone, and tell me what your average screen time is per day. Two hours? Five? Seven? If so – shut up: you’ve time to read.
It doesn't have to be Keats. Start by building the habit (read in bed before sleeping!) and just read whatever you enjoy. If Keats seems like a hurdle, just pick up Pratchett or Tolkien.
Typically screen time is very scattered through the day.
You cannot read a book in 30” increments.
Try it. Leave your phone at home. Carry a paperback book. Whenever you have time to kill and look for your phone, take out the book. See what happens. You may be surprised.
You can read poetry in very short increments. And Keats is poetry
1 reply →
Stephen King talks about this in On Writing. He carries a book with him wherever he goes and reads in 10m increments throughout the day.
So yes, it’s very possible. (Even easier if you are amenable to audiobooks IMO.)
I find it really amusing that there's a sort of standardized Hacker News style that we all follow to some degree or another. It's very polite and academic.
This style is forced on us by the dislikes. I believe everyone including me walks on egg shells while writing on hacker news. Becausethe moment your words evoke a frown on someone's forehead then you are in danger of getting a barrage of dislikes. And on Hacker News some if not everyone are treating as if it's a LinkedIn where some magical collaborator or a VC would view all my posts and comments and lend me a hand and say. He you are filled with interesting ideas and expertise with the "karma" to match. Why not work with me on n my million dollar project. Atleast that's on my mind. I believe that's what many are thinking too. But since Hacker News is basically software and computer people so their writing style would look like academic too
> I often catch myself imitating the flow, style,
Its a struggle trying to "imitate the style" in writing. In music, you could keep playing all the songs in the style of your favorite artist and possible develop a close stylistic proximity to what you're imitating but in writing do you just write prose with the same wordings? i get the keep reading to develop your style but feels like adapting a style you want to master and then make your own variant is way harder in writing.
"Style" is complicated to copy in both cases if you don't know what you're looking for.
In music, you have voicing sparsity, changes in voice count, preferred pitch ranges, tension/release cadences, embellishments, richness, playfulness, and a host of other characteristics. Rachmaninoff, for example (among other things), favours active, moving octaves quite deep in the base, extremely rich chords in the middle treble, simple (local) rythymic patterns, and expanding simple ideas like repeated arpeggios into large parts of a piece. He has more voices than other pieces typical of his time, though they tend to be combined somewhat simply when contrasted with counterpoint exercises and other techniques typically involving fewer voices.
In writing, you have sentence length, sentence complexity (they're different), typical volume used to express an idea, specific word choices, whether you tend to observe concrete or abstract ideas, the level of "truth" in your statements (in many flavours -- deadpan humour being quite different from a boldfaced lie directed toward the reader), technique choice used for signposting, willingness to violate "rules," and so on. If you picked even one project proposal from me at $WORK, you could reliably separate it from those written by hundreds of other engineers just by a few quirks -- habitually providing one level of motivation deeper than is typically expressed in technical writing (not just what we're doing, but what we're not doing and why we made that choice), a tendency to use British spellings and US words, a pattern of contracting any verb tense, sometimes with multiple apostrophes (e.g., "there'll've been"), refusing to terminate a non-exhaustive list without informing the reader that it's non-exhaustive, and so on. If you look at the reasons and motivations for one of those quirks, it's that I tend to have complete ideas (in technical domains) and want to express them completely and have found that every missing detail causes eventual problems -- only tempered by the fact that the requisite length tends also to cause important details to be overlooked on a casual read, which provides a mild damper on length. Understanding that motivation makes it easy to apply it as if you were me even when you don't have concrete examples regarding specific quirk/scenario interactions.
Very cool analogy with Rachmaninoff. The quirks are the differentiator and its important to recognize these deliberate choices you point out and it's not just a checklist. (Note to self to annotate more and deliberately study/reflect on those annotations to understand that construction/quirk)
I think the issue here might be that you're familiar with what "style" is supposed to be in music, so you know how imitating it would look (rather, sound) like.
On the contrary, you may have no idea what style means in the context of writing, so you can't fathom what imitating writing style looks like.
I honestly don't know precisely either, but a couple of things to mull over: Clarke and Asimov are said to have a "dry" style. Most of their novels are "story". On the contrary, Eco describes things in very minute detail (there's a whole chapter in "The name of the rose" that is the description of a door).
Those are examples of elements of style you may be able to reproduce and that aren't limited to wording.
Very interesting. Yes - the way the narrative is constructed is probably more accessible to understand.
When new deltarune chapters come out, they definitely influence my writing and thoughts lol.
I find myself rewording things to avoid claude and chatgpt-isms. You don't realize how much you say "You're absolutely right" on a day to day basis...