Hacker News Comments on
The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this book.The most famous book on prose is "the elements of style" but is anachronistic IMO. I propose to read "The Sense of Style" by Pinker instead: https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons-Writing/...
Another sentence I tried - "I wasn't that interested in working on my project today and hence I preferred to stay at home and watch Netflix in spite of the multitude of issues reported." is show as very hard! It makes me question if the original developer of this app has even read good well-known style guides for the English language.I'd advice you to read a good style manual to understand more about writing and how to use words. One doesn't have to forcibly introduce words that are too complicated. There are good organic ways to write sentences that employ seemingly complex words in a natural way so that readers can understand quite well. The goal should be to elevate the users to get better at reading in addition to conveying your material, IMO.
A good book to read would be Steven Pinker's Sense of Style - https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons-Writing/....
One doesn't have to degrade their sentences just because we live in the age of attention span deterioration and social media. All of these minor tweaks can help people improve their attention spans by releasing micro dopamine orgasms.
⬐ paulcole> The goal should be to elevate the users to get better at reading in addition to conveying your material, IMO.Depends on the audience and the purpose of the piece, IMO.
> Commas and periods that are part of the overall sentence go inside the quotation marks, even though they aren’t part of the original quotation.Please never do this.
Commas and full stops have meaning. You’re modifying the original quote without telling the reader that you have done so. How this became the accepted practice in so many style guides and grammar checkers I will never understand. I shall defer to Geoffrey Pullum’s Punctuation and human freedom [0], whose title is entirely appropriate, for justification. Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style [1] can provide the unconvinced further justification.
[0] http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/punctfree.pdf [1] https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons-Writing/...
I highly recommend Steven Pinker's "The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century".It is full of practical advice. I've read a lot of amateur (students/hobbyists) writing, so I can say his advice addresses a lot of common mistakes.
[] https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons-Writing/...