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Some thoughts on writing

danluu.com · 9,847 words · saved by 6 readers

I see a lot of essays framed as writing advice which are actually thinly veiled descriptions of how someone writes that basically say "you should write how I write", e.g., people who write short posts say that you should write short posts. As with technical topics, I think a lot of different things can work and what's really important is that you find a style that's suitable to you and the context you operate in. Copying what's worked for someone else is unlikely to work for you, making "write how I write" bad advice. We'll start by looking at how much variety there's been in what's worked1 for people, come back to what makes it so hard to copy someone else's style, and then discuss what I try to do in my writing. If I look at the most read programming blogs in my extended social circles2 from 2000 to 20173, it's been Joel Spolsky, Paul Graham, Steve Yegge, and Julia Evans (if you're not familiar with these writers, see the appendix for excerpts that I think are representative of their

Some thoughts on writing I see a lot of essays framed as writing advice which are actually thinly veiled descriptions of how someone writes that basically say "you should write how I write", e.g., people who write short posts say that you should write short posts . As with technical topics, I think a lot of different things can work and what's really important is that you find a style that's suitable to you and the context you operate in . Copying what's worked for someone else is unlikely to work for you , making "write how I write" bad advice. We'll start by looking at how much variety there

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