I found it quite impressive that people are capable of this. For me, I have neither energy, nor ability, nor comprehensive knowledge to do so. So, it is always fascinating (and a bit intimidating) to see people writing these all the time. I want to ask how you guys achieve this feat.
Maybe, is it that I am nonverbal so I cannit write coherently?
I am guilty of writing walls of text as comments, but I try to stick to my lane. You can see my most recent wall of text about freeze dryers as an example. There are a few things that I think need to come together to create a good, high-effort post:
- Passion - If you don’t care, you aren’t going to spend the time to write about something
- Knowledge - For some topics this may be less required, but I tend to create walls of text about technical issues. I have a PhD in physics, so that gives me a pretty good foundation of knowledge to work from in this regard
- Writing Ability - You need to be able to write effectively to make a wall of text worthwhile. This is a skill that gets better the more you do it.
The other thing I tend to do when writing a high-effort post is I actually proofread it before making it. I try to cut out unneeded tangents, reword things that might be confusing, or supplement things that aren’t motivated enough.
For me personally, this doesn’t take me too long to do since I have been writing and presenting about extremely technical topics for about two decades at this point. Like I mentioned above, informative writing is a skill that gets better with practice. So, doing it regularly as a significant part of my job as well as providing feedback to others on their writing/presentations, has provided me with tons of practice to improve these things.
If you want some formal guidance on scientific writing/presentations specifically, two books I have found informative (mostly on presentations) have been:
- The Craft of Scientific Presentations by Michael Alley
- slide:ology - The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations by Nancy Duarte
I find myself having to delete tangents as well! I feel that my writing begins conversational, with brief asides for nuance or comedy. That style does work well for presentations. But if I am trying to be as concise and informative as possible, I find that I need to trim a lot.
It is an interesting excersice in observing how your brain relays information naturally and how you need to ‘translate’ that into effective communication with others.
That style does work well for presentations
I honestly prefer presentations to writing for the reasons you pointed out. I have never been too nervous when it comes to public speaking, and I feel much more able to convey my point through a more conversational style. However, my presentation style (specifically slide design) has had to change a lot over the course of my career.
When I was in grad school, my preferred method of presentation was to have a slide with a single graph/image/diagram on it and then verbally talk through all the things I wanted to convey for that slide. It allowed me tons of flexibility, kept the slides from becoming cluttered and distracting, and created a more conversational atmosphere as people felt more empowered to ask questions as I was going (this also helps keep the audience engaged).
However, as I moved into a professional setting, I had a mentor sit me down and tell me how great my presentations were, but they were not really effective in a corporate setting like this one (global company, split across timezones, etc). The simple reason being that the slides I was making were being shared to others who couldn’t make it to my presentation and a good chunk of the actual audience of the presentation only ever got to see the slides, without the benefit of my talking to help them understand. So, this has led me to move more towards including text on my slides. I basically have to ask myself if there is enough information on this slide to understand things without my explaining it, but without anything extra to make it confusing.
Since the pandemic, I have also had to change things up a bit to make presentations more amenable to presenting via Teams/Zoom. This means things like removing videos, complex animation, or any audio. It just doesn’t work reliably enough through screen sharing and if you can find a way around it, then it makes everybody’s life easier.
Speaking of tangents, this has been a long one, but I care a lot about effective communication and specifically presentations. So many people are so bad at giving a good presentation, and I find it frustrating personally, when I have to sit through so many.
I try to keep my writing somewhere in the middle. Easy examples include intent, which is sometimes more important than the explanation itself, as well as outlining alternative ideas/approaches and why they weren’t used.
I greatly appreciate insight into the thought process of others and try to pay it forward.
I see. Maybe learning mathematics have screwed my writing since so much of mathematical literature is simply equations, definitions and propositions. Lots of papers, and even books, are just bad at expositions, in my experience.
I actually agree with you about math education and math texts. It is really bad at conveying understanding and my math-heavy courses were the toughest for me (E&M in grad school was awful). Too often math textbooks simply present things and leave the proof as an exercise for the reader, or they will lean too far the other way and present formal proofs for everything. Either way is not helpful for developing an intuitive understanding of what is going on.
The things that helped me develop communication skills the most were simply doing it a lot followed by having some good mentors that I found to be good communicators. My grad school advisor was great at communicating physics and one of my early bosses in industry was an excellent presenter. So, I would often bounce either writing or slides off of them for feedback.
I also found that watching ‘video essays’ on Youtube helped me develop and understand communication skills after years of math education. Depending on what you are interested in, Youtubers like Tom Scott, Every Frame of Painting, Miniminuteman, and Ask a Mortician are fantastic places to start.
Regarding comprehensive knowledge: there might be a lot of topics where you lack the knowledge to write a good and detailed answer. There might even be topics where you don’t even have a clue what they are actually asking about.
But I am sure there are topics where you are the person in the know. And someday, someone will ask a question where you are the person perfectly qualified to answer it.
Adding to what everyone else has said.
… You know what helped me learn how to write (which I now do for a living)? Yes, talking in comment sections – But specifically.
I spent a lot of time in fandom forums.
Why does this matter?
Well.
TV Show fandoms are very low-stakes, you know? If you’re learning to swim you start at the kiddy pool, not the olympic one. So you can participate in discussions, make up headcanons, and learn how to express your ideas… And if you do get picked apart or something, even if you actually, genuinely, fucked up and were straight up wrong. It’s… Y’know. It’s just a TV show. So you can, in fact, let it go.
It’s different from when you’re talking about something serious, something important. If you’re writing about something technical and you mess up, you can end up spreading misinformation. On a political discussion, being clear on what you mean is important because the stuff being talked about matters. Not so for a fandom.
Oh and – Re-read what you wrote, and use that edit button if you catch something you missed.
Oh and – Re-read what you wrote, and use that edit button if you catch something you missed.
This is a big one. I see social media posts and online comments that are so poorly misspelled and incoherent, that I would swear English was their second language, but I went to school with some of these people. I KNOW they should know better!
It’s just a TV show. So you can, in fact, let it go.
The MST3K mantra is always good advice.
Read a lot, cite sources and explain thouroughly what you think.
I mostly use the last method. Basically, you want to make sure that the other person understands fully what you mean. You can use examples and anecdotes as well.
Training yourself in philosophy also helps, as it makes sure you argument well what you want to say.
There are many people on lemmy who are very passionate and/or opinionated about certain topics. So when a discussion about that topic comes up, they tend to go hard on the comment section. Also, for some terminally online people, this is literally their only social space to express themselves.
Long posts rely on what is basically the essay format you learned in high school, following the old rule-of-three.
Three main sections:
- Introduction
- Thesis
- Conclusion.
Each section is further split into three:
- The basic idea, background, why it matters.
- Three supporting arguments, from different angles
- Thesis restated, arguments summarised, you should agree.
And each supported argument is further divided into P1, P2, C - either modus ponens or modus tollens.
Modus ponens is ‘X is true, X implies Y, therefore Y is true’.
Modus tollens is ‘X implies Y, but Y is false, therefore X is also false’
Of course, not every long post is necessarily an attempt to convince someone, so you modify the technique to suit the content. Sometimes you’re just setting out to explain or inform - but this changes less than you’d think: instead of frogmarching someone towards your conclusion, you’re leading them towards understanding. In either case, you still break up the concepts into about three pieces, and present them in an order that makes the conclusion feel inevitable.
If you want to expand beyond that, you can break it down inwards, splitting supporting concepts in three, or you can build it outwards, making three supporting arguments for each basic angle.
One important thing to remember is that nobody wants to read a huge unbroken wall of text, so use paragraphs to break up separate ideas into small manageable chunks with whitespace in between. And remember that the last sentence of a paragraph hits like a mic drop, so use this strategically.
Another trick is to sound out the post in your head and think about cadence; you don’t want a string of five-word sentences that all fall off at the end. If you have a whole page of “Dada da da da DUM. Dada dada da DUM. Da dada da daDUM.”, your readers will get annoyed and dismiss you without necessarily knowing why. You need to change up the rhythm, throw in some parenthetical clauses, vary the length and keep the flow of tex sounding interesting. It makes the difference between school assembly anouncements and a professional youtuber.
Honestly it’s all a bit of a hack - once you get the hang of it, you can hammer it out all day with surprisingly little effort.
Look into technical writing. I took it in college but I’m sure you can find free resources online about it. In short, good technical writing is:
- accurate
- concise
- clear
- usable
- readable
Of course, that’s easier said than done. It makes sense to make a rough outline of what you want to write before you write it. It’s also good to look over what you’ve written afterwards. If you keep these basic principles in mind while planning, writing, and revising, you can make your writing more effective.
What you said immediately reminded me Grice’s “Logic and Conversation”. The author outline what he calls “conversational maxims”, that resemble a lot your five bullet points - except that they don’t just apply to technical writing, they’re more like principles that we “automatically” use in human conversation. They are:
- Maxim of quantity - “be as informative as possible and needed, and no more.”
- Maxim of quality - “be truthful; don’t give false or unconfirmed info.”
- Maxim of relation - “be relevant; say things that are pertinent to the discussion.”
- Maxim of manner - “be clear, brief, and orderly; avoid obscurity and ambiguity.”
Those four maxims are constantly being violated by the speakers, as they’re in conflict with each other. For example, clarity (maxim of manner) often requires simplifying things, to the point that they aren’t as accurate (maxim of quality) as before.
This is relevant here because, if you can’t avoid violating those maxims, you need to reach a compromise. And good writing is about finding a good compromise for the target readers.
Ah the gricean maximes, the bane of my intro to pragmatics class
I did well in pragmatics. My bane was syntax - that professor did a really poor job even to explain the basics, for example I still don’t know why the hell you’re supposed to spam XP, X’ and X in generative trees even if they won’t branch out anyway.
Here the need part: you dont. Because chomskyite grammar sucks sweaty balls.
Tbf, by my second run through Intro to Pragmatics i got the maxims. But our prof had some really strange interpretations of them.
I feel that to a certain point, good technical writing is just beautiful, too. It is elegant. I recently purchased a copy of the Haynes manual for my car and the writing is just remarkable. So much information collated in such a clean and impressive manner. It feels nice to read the book, to engage with the complexity, and feel like you’re not being left to your own devices with picking up jargon or trying to understand a difficult procedure. I feel it takes a great deal of intelligence and experience to reach the “beautiful” stage, where your writing is not only accurate, concise, clear, usable and readable, but also expertly organized.
I don’t know, even if I’m extremely prone to write huge walls of text, and need to actually take my time to abridge them.
(And every bloody time that I do abridge it, some reply makes me regret it.)
When someone points out something I deleted or only alluded to for the sake of brevity, it kills me. I want to respond “…yes, I know I actually wanted to write that, but wasn’t sure anyone would care or even read it.”
But knowing everything doesn’t get you any extra credit on Lemmy or in real life. Speaking as a recovering teachers pet my entire academic life, I find it’s best to just remember that it is just a conversation. Especially on Lemmy, responses to comments are pretty rare, so any thoughtful response is welcome.
I’m fine with replies correctly filling what I’ve deleted with actual and meaningful info.
Instead, most of the time, I regret it due to some reply misrepresenting what I said - because the replier is now assuming shit, or interpreting literally a figure of speech that I’ve used for brevity, etc.
I’ve started the habit of using spoiler tags to collapse tangents when I go overboard at times. It makes it easier for me to scroll past, so I’d assume it’s also easier for people who aren’t actively engaging with my posts to deal with.
The wall-o-text comments on Lemmy are the worst. No shame at all in not being that person.
Not the best? I like high effort posts and comments…
I agree. I usually like to hear people out if they are knowledgeable. Depends on the topic, though.
Sometimes I get into a long story, but overall, I’m with you. I usually just read the first few sentences and move on.
The TLDR is great if people include it. But sometimes it is hard to be that concise.
Get emotional about something. And you’re done. You’ll likely go on and on with some ramblings about that.
The other thing is writing coherently and with some structure to the text. That just takes practice. But platforms like Lemmy are a good place to practice your skills. I imagine it to be difficult to start, though. You need to find some topic. Something you have to say something about, a bit of knowledge. And ideally it’s something you care about. So you have some incentive to put in the work. Writing it down properly just takes time and a bit of practice. At least for most people.
You just get started. Its part of the reason I’ve always preferred either forums or fark/ digg/ reddit/ lemmy style conversations.
Also, writing is a skill. You get better at it with time. Its like how a TV show host can just ‘riff’ on a topic. I think responding to comments has definitely improved my ability to write in particular style (engaging/ proactive/ enthusiastic, whatever.).
It also helps to be familiar with markdown, as good formatting makes the writing more satisfying.
I was just talking about how commenting has made me reflect on how effectively I communicate in everyday life. I only ever lurked on Reddit because it seemed like everyone had already said what was worth commenting on. But on Lemmy, there is an opportunity to give it a shot and see what happens.
The worst case is someone picks apart what you were trying to articulate (rare), or no one responds (common). In the best case, you have an engaging conversation (also rare).
Write what you know, take your time, and make many corrections before posting. If it’s very long, provide a TL/DR
For me, lengthy is enough to fill one computer screen.
I typically use a physical keyboard but Futo Voice Input is an option.
Have you not learned to write essays in school? It’s a similar skill.
It takes hours to write essays for me…
That’s easy, I don’t. But in general just practice and try to have fun. More talk doesn’t mean more knowledge.
comprehensive knowledge
That’s the neat part!
