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orthonormal comments on Improving My Writing Style - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: orthonormal 11 October 2011 04:14PM

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Comment author: orthonormal 11 October 2011 04:18:59PM 1 point [-]

Problems I Think I Have:

  • I over-formalize things.
  • I feel a need to anticipate and answer every possible objection, and so I lose the ability to say something simply the first time around.
  • I write overly convoluted sentence structures.

Possible Remedies:

  • I might be able to do NaNoWriMo, which would certainly train me to do without over-editing.
  • I've been wanting to do an FAQ on some issue that's very basic and brief at first, and only summons more material when you click on a sentence that you object to.
Comment author: r_claypool 11 October 2011 06:03:09PM *  4 points [-]

I write overly convoluted sentence structures.

YAKiToMe has helped me with this problem. Hearing the text as speech gives me a new perspective on what I have written; it makes the awkward stuff more obvious.

Comment author: Jonathan_Graehl 12 October 2011 06:04:09AM 1 point [-]

Is closing your eyes and listening to someone read a better test of intelligibility than reading aloud to yourself? I think so, in that it can be easier to fool yourself into thinking that you've understood something when you flyby-eyeball it.

Comment author: orthonormal 14 October 2011 10:17:27PM 0 points [-]

Hmm. On the one hand, I'd get pretty impatient with that really quickly, especially given how many words I use that wouldn't be in its dictionary. On the other hand, if it inspires me to err on the side of terse and simple English, that might be a good thing.

It does give me another good idea, though: I can print out a paper copy. With my academic papers, at least, I notice all sorts of things in print that I gloss over when it's on a screen.

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