#writing #cohost-repost
2023-02-27

see, the thing you have to understand is that writing is, at heart, about lying to people. Sure, you're getting facts across. but if you just tell people facts they stop reading after the first line or two unless they're a student.

so the entire rest of the writing process is figuring out how to tell interesting enough almost-truths that people will read the parts that matter, without like, lying to them outright.

but even the best scientific papers lie a bit, smoothing over a lot of the parts. it's not in the text, done well before that. But still lying, a little. "Lying" feels charged but i mean it neutrally here -- framing usually requires going outside of straight factual to make it accessible to audiences who aren't you and your lab and other labs.

I think about that blogpost journal paper a lot lately, and how even with it's gentle lies in parts of it, it's still more factual and straightforward than most papers I've seen. Narrative, the lying part, adds to the paper because, well, otherwise it's 90% protocol text everyone skips over and loses all the details of.

and I think how much of scientific breakthroughs came because twitter posting meant things could easily go cross-field and find interested people with expertise to add. But it required blogging to get there.

I'm not sure formal writing matters anymore. a few years ago I listened to this lecture on writing where the gist of it is that public school taught people to write to teachers and not to people, and writing to people DOES require some level of narrative or you lose people. ESPECIALLY in high-level things like lawyering and science.

but for broadcast writing and not just interpersonal, we use some wild conventions that don't actually matter to anyone, anywhere, outside the standardized testing boards.

Blogposts have driven the tech industry for decades. I'm not sure that's a good thing -- its easy to find old ones and not find their replies. But I think there's maybe a useful middle ground here.

especially with documentation.

idk where I'm going for this, but cohost, twitter, mastodon, tumblr, blog clusters, all managed to come up with standardized structures and keywords that still enable excellent skimmability while still not requiring people to write blocks of protocol-only text¹. The point when I started getting taken seriously in non-social-media written communication is when I said fuck it and just wrote like I do these, just with less swears and more capitalization of the first word in sentences and proper names.

And way shorter paragraphs -- people hate long ones. They don't have the time or motivation. The dedicated will read 'em, but that creates it's own filter, one you probably don't want when dealing with bureaucracy as much as I do.

[1]: outside of the "yes I know the problem is capitalism" you have to send at the bottom of any tweet critiquing specifics of capitalism