A writing tip I learned at Oxford

https://newsletter.timber.fm/p/a-writing-tip-i-learned-at-oxford

by mooreds • 5 years ago

114 82 5 years ago

newsletter.timber.fm

foxbarrington• 5 years ago

The tip: read your writing out loud.

amerine• 5 years ago

Thank you.

OttPeterR• 5 years ago

Saved me a click

BugsJustFindMe• 5 years ago

Thanks. It felt like I was trying to find how long to cook something and at what temperature and instead the author is only interested in telling me about their grandmother's sweaters and childhood summers in Vermont.

hh3k0• 5 years ago

You nailed it. That's precisely how I felt.

fancy_pantser• 5 years ago

I made this Chrome extension to help skip to the recipe on those long-winded sites. Someone on here years ago encouraged me to build it!

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...

late2part• 5 years ago

Another tip I learned early on: "Don't bury the lede."

ta9882• 5 years ago

lede?

dghughes• 5 years ago

I was taught that writing and speaking are very different you tend to speak much differently than you'd write. Maybe that was bad advice.

pfortuny• 5 years ago

Indeed: it seems (according to TA Eliot) that Henry James dictated his latest novels to a typist (or something similar) and that accounts for the density and lack of freshness (also of his revises edition of his works, which he did in his old age).

grayclhn• 5 years ago

You do, but the goal here isn't to write the way you speak, it's to force a different engagement with your own writing than you would get otherwise. This page from the UNC writing center gives a better explanation: https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/reading-aloud/

I try to follow this advice for important emails, and it helps a lot.

cf• 5 years ago

I'd say writing that's like your speech without filler words and backtracking to rephrase what you just said can make for remarkably great prose.

nojs• 5 years ago

PG has some interesting thoughts about this: http://www.paulgraham.com/talk.html

abdullahkhalids• 5 years ago

If you write on a computer, printing the essay in a different font/color/line spacing, and reading it, also works.

permo-w3• 5 years ago

I suspect that that may have been the case for people who grew up without and don’t primarily communicate with the internet, people whose writing style is mainly shaped by a school syllabus, but nowadays I’d guess that that’s falling away, to an extent

NaOH• 5 years ago

I’ve also closed my eyes and used a computer’s text-to-speech capability. I find this helpful when my writing is fresh and I’m apt to be reading as much from memory as with my eyes.

ta9882• 5 years ago

Yes I'm doing that all the time. There is no good TTS on Linux so I often have to use online tools. I need to try some of the cloud providers TTS systems, their demo sound great.

bennysomething• 5 years ago

Yep, thanks, tried scanning it to find the but of advice. Failed:)

DamnInteresting• 5 years ago

I can corroborate; I've been writing long-form for years, and somewhere along the way I began releasing my works as podcast episodes. There have been many occasions where I didn't recognize problems until I was recording the narration.

teekert• 5 years ago

Hero!

gojomo• 5 years ago

I half expected it to be, "Add credibility signifiers like 'I learned this at Oxford' to your headlines."

stared2• 5 years ago

It might be useful for writing essays.

It is essential for writing YouTube comments - https://xkcd.com/481/.

jordanmorgan10• 5 years ago

I read this comment out loud

dcminter2• 5 years ago

"imminently listenable" - I think my writing advice would be: don't give writing advice about proof reading if you're prone to typos!

Author presumably meant "emminently listenable" (a bit of a cliché but not heinous).

etrevino• 5 years ago

Surely he mean eminently listenable.

function_seven• 5 years ago

Muphry's Law strikes again!

dcminter2• 5 years ago

Hah, indeed. Hoist by my own.

tonetheman• 5 years ago

A much better lesson: https://stevenpressfield.com/2009/10/writing-wednesdays-2-th...

TL;DR no one wants to read your sh*t

blowski• 5 years ago

People obviously want to read other people’s shit, or we wouldn’t have books, newspapers, RSS readers, search engines, etc.

But people don’t want to just read it because it’s there. They want to read it because they think they’ll get something out of it. If they think it will take too much effort, then they won’t want to read it.

Keep writing. Don’t just be a consumer of other people’s writing. Don’t say “I’ll never be Stephen King so what’s the point”. Keep writing. Even if people aren’t interested today, one day they will be.

andai• 5 years ago

Here it is. Here’s the #1 lesson you learn working in advertising (and this has stuck with me, to my advantage, my whole working life):

Nobody wants to read your shit.

Let me repeat that. Nobody–not even your dog or your mother–has the slightest interest in your commercial for Rice Krispies or Delco batteries or Preparation H. Nor does anybody care about your one-act play, your Facebook page or your new sesame chicken joint at Canal and Tchopotoulis.

It isn’t that people are mean or cruel. They’re just busy.

Nobody wants to read your shit.

LegitShady7• 5 years ago

Another writing tip, which is the antithesis of today's recipe blogging culture to which this post belongs.

- If I can't find the most important part of your writing in 3 seconds, I've already moved on.

Take the linked article - I clicked on it for a writing tip. In the first paragraph they suddenly tell me it's not about a writing tip, it's 'weaving together three things'.

Now I scan the article quickly looking for the writing tip, because I don't care about the history of the writing tip before I've evaluated if it's any good.

3 seconds are up, and my patience is gone, and while the author is very interested in their history of writing tutorials at oxford, literally nobody else is.

I'll only care about it if I think the writing tip is interesting, but I can't find the writing tip because it's organized like a recipe blog - you click for a recipe, and they hide the recipe somewhere on the page. At least with recipes you can recognize the format of the recipe down the page somewhere, making scanning easier. With this I can't even do that.

So here's the writing tip for the author - don't hook someone in promising a writing tip, and then hide that writing tip. If it's enough of a tip to get me interested in your story, I'll read it. If it's not, then you just clickbaited me and nothing you write matters.

I classify this as some sort of weird ultra snobbery ('I learned this at oxford') clickbait ('here's a writing tip I'm going to hide in a diary entry'). Promise me a writing tip, give me the writing tip, or lose my interest forever (because now I classify you as recipe blog I won't click on it again).

bryanrasmussen2• 5 years ago

that was a pretty long comment, with a lot of points to follow.

LegitShady7• 5 years ago

but you can find the main point in 3 seconds - it's in the second line, on it's own, with a symbol beside it. Then I get into the story. You can choose to follow along or not afterward - you've gotten the most important point right away.

YeGoblynQueenne• 5 years ago

>> If I can't find the most important part of your writing in 3 seconds, I've already moved on.

You should try to to qualify that with the kind of writing you mean, because taken literally, that's a weird way to read anything. For instance, what is "the most important part" in War and Peace, or Song of Ice and Fire, that the reader should be able to find in 3 seconds?

LegitShady7• 5 years ago

No, I shouldn't. I was clearly talking about blog posts and similar articles. It wasn't a criticism of dostoyevsky, either. smh

m1117• 5 years ago

Writing tip: add "TLDR;".

xchip• 5 years ago

TL;DR read aloud what you wrote because it is easier to catch mistakes

Noumenon72• 5 years ago

This leaves out the sample from Steven King that illustrates adding words for rhythm and not meaning.

CrazyPyroLinux• 5 years ago

Pay attention to spelling, grammar and Oxford commas.

maga2• 5 years ago

I see what you did there and I disapprove. But seriously, I find Oxford commas so useful that I catch myself trying to use them in three other languages that don't have them.

HDMI_Cable• 5 years ago

May I ask which languages don’t have them? I can’t think of any European or Indian language that doesn’t use them (when writing with the Latin script). I may be wrong though.

stared2• 5 years ago

EDIT:

Pay attention to speling, a grammar and Oxford commas.

Jiocus• 5 years ago

I ended up studying English Romantic poetry with the late Jonathan Wordsworth, who was a great-great-great nephew of the famous poet William Wordsworth.

Sounds like they were Worth their Words.

cassepipe• 5 years ago

Worth recommanding too from Howard S Becker : https://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/craft_articles/b...

randcraw• 5 years ago

I buy the OP's advice when the writer hopes to engage their audience in a light conversational medium like a podcast. But is talk the only style of communication to aspire to?

Yes, much great writing is musical. But surely no composer of stout heart sets the stage using only one musical style, nor ask the same voice to sing every aria. Nor are all great works vocal.

Does it not make more sense for authors to explore the telling of tales through many voices in many rooms, and not just one?

V-22• 5 years ago

A writing tip I learned at community college: "get to the point".

dang4• 5 years ago

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

V-22• 5 years ago

Succint doesn't mean shallow.

antonvs5• 5 years ago

It's a deceptively deep dismissal. Please think before posting comments like this.

javajosh• 5 years ago

It's not "imminently listenable", it's "eminently listenable". The first phrase means we are going to listen very, very soon; the latter means it's very listenable.

(Normally I wouldn't nitpick, but this is a post about writing and the mistake is in the 2nd paragraph so. Also, the tip is to read aloud.)

elpakal• 5 years ago

upvote from me for the tldr, thanks!

hyperpallium22• 5 years ago

Sounds like the tip fails for homonyms.

lupire• 5 years ago

Sounds like the tip falls for homophones.

kelsus• 5 years ago

It says "eminently listenable" now. Nice catch.

8dfu8uasd• 5 years ago

It's not "imminently listenable", it's "eminently listenable".

Are you sure this isn't a deliberate wordplay? A tiger ready to pounce on you in the jungle is an imminent danger; a great story read by a skilled voice actor is imminently listenable.

Also, you put the comma and period outside your double quotes. We computer programmers often do this, but this is incorrect in American English: the punctuation goes inside the double quotes. In British English the punctuation does indeed go outside the quotes unless the punctuation is actually being quoted, but the British use single quotes.[1]

American English: "Your color is changing," she said.

British English: `Your colour is changing', she said.

[1] https://www.thesaurus.com/e/grammar/does-punctuation-go-insi...

permo-w3• 5 years ago

the British use single quotes

That’s not true, or at least it’s not what I was taught at my British primary school, and it’s not what you see people use. Maybe historically that’s true, I don’t know. The current British consensus is to use double quotes.

Sometimes you see single quotes in headlines when the author doesn’t want to imply that they’re making a direct quote

stefandesu• 5 years ago

I'm a non-native English speaker and I somewhat deliberately mix different parts of American and British English. For example, I usually use American spelling, but for some things (like "toward" vs. "towards") the British way (or rather the way which is more common in Britain compared to America) sounds "more right" to me. I also put commas/periods outside quotes because I could never understand why they should be inside.

antonvs5• 5 years ago

Are you sure this isn't a deliberate wordplay?

Apparently not, because the author has since corrected it.

the British use single quotes.[1]

It's not that simple, because "the British" rather notoriously spread to many places. There are large ex-colony countries like Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, where English is the primary language; and others where it's a major official language, like South Africa and India.

When it comes to rules like the ones you mention, they tend to vary because of varying degrees of American vs. British influence, as well as local variation; and of course, this all changes over time.

A better and more realistic treatment of the subject of punctuation in quotes can be found here: https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-pun1.htm

permo-w3• 5 years ago

since we’re being pedantic, the first phrase actually means that we’ll be able to listen very soon, not that we will

arielm• 5 years ago

I recently discovered this top on my own while starting a new podcast that’s based on a written newsletter.

It’s not (always) a word for word read, but after a few sessions of reading the newsletter out loud as I was recording, I noticed my writing has become more fluid and the content easier to digest (in my opinion, at least).

It was kind of hard (really, awkward) to read my own writing at first, but it got easier.

A really great tip!

arkades• 5 years ago

I’ve been listening to a lot of audiobooks recently and very much had the related thought: text written for reading is distinct from that written for reading aloud, and a LOT of books are a miserable slog when they’re stuck in the wrong category.

A writing tip I learned at Oxford

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