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Perplexed comments on Age, fluid intelligence, and intelligent posts - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm 63. I think I'm a better writer now - mostly because I have learned to make my writing less dense. As a thinker, I'm pretty sure I have lost some ability to think deeply - to understand new and complex ideas. But in compensation, I have a better ability to evaluate broadly - to quickly see the various implications of simple ideas in a complex context.
I'm not sure I was ever very good at producing long works - more than 5 paragraphs, say. But I do notice more now that I don't really have the patience for finishing big projects. Or for suffering fools gladly.
Could you expand on how you've made your writing less dense?
I could probably use more redundancy/roughage myself.
I use short sentences sometimes. I'm not afraid to repeat myself. And sometimes I deliberately write in a country-boy/Will Rodgers conversational voice.
When watching movies, watch for scenes where someone is being interrogated, and they find it necessary to step back from providing a direct answer to a question and instead insert a short anecdote to provide the context for the pithy answer to the original question. Notice how the transition from direct response to anecdote and then back to response is signaled by a change in body language, tone, and even formality of language.
You need to provide similar signals when writing. And since you can't do your signaling using body language, you need to do it by wasting some words. Go ahead and "waste" them. Words are cheap.
That was the structure your post used! ...which was an awesome example of a coherent meshing of form and content, where the claims were consistent with the exhibited behavior.
From my mid-twenties to my early thirties while writing in online discussion forums I've noticed something like content-behavior coherence increasing but I've never really thought about it explicitly or hypothesized mechanisms.
My impression is that my writing has increased in quality but decreased in flexibility? If I've determined for myself the correct answer to something based on previously existing evidence I'm likely to be acting in a manner consistent with my beliefs and can simply re-verify the state of evidence on the subject and its connection to my conclusions and then (assuming the answer hasn't changed) repeat the earlier sentiment with more attention to communication. The content-behavior coherence might fall out of this, but I still struggle with verbosity...
Hey! This suggests an improvement strategy: find a forum for writers talking about the craft of writing, and experiment with asking questions and later with giving advice about writing until I can offer good advice that has "behavior-content coherence" :-)