One of the tough pills I and probably many other developers have had to swallow when maturing is that "non-programming skills" from schools are useful and very valuable, actually. Writing is one of them. Everyone loves a programmer that can explain themselves. An opinion isn't worth having if you aren't able to defend it either. Maintaining a blog therefore seems like a great way of improving your writing skills while also testing your own opinions.
Writing down opinions on things have done wonders for my ability to reason about them, especially when the opinions are built on 10 years of "hunch" and no discussion.
[Self-promotion warning] My blog that nobody read turned into a published book. An editor for a small publishing firm happened to come across my blog and thought that it might be good as a book. He contacted me and after about a year of work (more than I expected) I finished the book and got it published. It's not that popular, but I'm very happy with it.
My point is that you don't need a massive audience. If you can reach one person and make them laugh, or teach someone something new, or give someone hope when they really needed it, then your writing will be worth it.
I have no idea about the journey that atoms of my body took to reach where they are now (as me, myself). I wish them good lucky on their future endeavours. I think we should get acclimatized to similar process about "Ideas and Concepts that we think originates from Us". These concepts will be meat grinded into large LLMs and hopefully help someone in future.
Writing a blog is like talking in the town square. Except because it’s digital, we seem to forget how communication works. If you just start talking in the town square, you’re standing alone talking. Sure a person who passes by might pause, but the odds you’re saying something really relevant to them are low, so they’ll move on.
The whole question of how you get in front of the right people and tweak your message based on their reactions, and then setup a routine so you have a dependable performance-audience, all seem to be lost on many folks.
Related, I think people have stopped.... reacting on the internet? I've been part of the X/Twitter to Bluesky migration and people often mention how 'quiet' Bluesky is.
I think that's not due to algorithmic intervention of product design etc., I think people are just tired. The novelty of shouting at strangers on the internet has worn off - how many internet fights have we gotten into that did nothing in the end except waste time? It's only worse with a coin flip's chance of the other person being an LLM. We're all tired.
I wonder if it's just creeping apathy, post-covid, current-AI boom. That we're just tired in life. There's a psych study, Dimensional Apathy Scale (DAS)[0] and one of the questions is basically "How much do I contact my friends?" I think it argues that the more apathy we feel, the less likely we are to reach out to others, and I imagine, the less likely we are to react or reply to comments (or even post).
I'm curious if the decline in reacting is matched by a decline in replying and posting in general.
Anyways, I worry that apathy is on the rise as we get overwhelmed with the rate of change and uncertainty in the 2020s and I'm working pretty hard to fight that apathy and bring more empathy, so if you're interested, please reach out to me the contact info in my bio.
This is relatable. I often find myself starting a reply on here, really thinking it through as I type it out, and then hitting delete on what I just wrote. Sometimes I even hit submit, and then delete a few moments later.
It's just hard to justify engaging. Worst case, I get a fight on my hands with someone who's as dogmatic as they are wrong, which is both frequent and also a complete waste of my time. (A tech readership is always going to veer hard into the well, akshually...) Most likely case, I get fictitious internet points. Which - I won't lie - tickle my lizard brain, just as they do everyone else's. But they don't actually achieve anything meaningful.
Best case is that I learn something. Realistically, this happens vanishingly infrequently, and the signal-noise ratio is much, much worse than if I just pulled a book off my shelf.
I suppose this is all an artifact of time and experience. Maybe I've just picked all the low-hanging fruit, and so I no longer have the patience to watch people endlessly repost the same xkcd strips from fifteen years ago, navel-gaze about tabs or spaces, share thrilling new facts that I have in fact known for many decades, etc. And while I'm very excited for them to discover all these things anew (and anew... and anew...), it's just not a good use of my time and patience to participate.
Well, if your try and force yourself to engage with multiple people, the site won't let you post that many comments in such a short time period. Which, overall, is a good thing I believe.
I saw this Carl Jung quote shared on Substack recently.
"Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you"."
I'm using writing as an outlet for an active mind these days. Thoughts that seem important to me and need to come out even if there is nobody there to read them.
Precisely why I maintain a diary. It listens to all of my thoughts, sans judgement. One of the best decisions I've ever made. Wish I did this years ago
If you want happiness through writing, write only for yourself. Never check site visitor analytics, comments, shares. Only care if you're enjoying the writing. To make it easier you can also write under a pseudonym.
Some of my worst habits formed seeing early posts go viral and then getting addicted to that endorphin hit. The amount of time I wasted checking analytics and new subs would probably equal the time it would take me to write 10 more posts or read a couple books.
Look on the bright side. Firstly, I just read it. Secondly, AI will likely read it, so your thoughts may become part of the great AI world consciousness someday. Finally you're really doing this for yourself; I find writing my thoughts out in a blog or a novel gives me some satisfaction knowing I have tried, and now have something out there forever that you or your friends can look back on someday.
100%. I didn't mean this to be a "woe is me" piece, despite the clickbait-y title. I just wanted to talk about the merits of publishing your writing without any actual readers. And some lessons on writing I've picked up.
I do it. I write[0], because it helps me to understand stuff better (tutorials), or because I work on "gut instinct," a lot, and writing it in a manner that explains it, forces me to "formalize" things.
My stuff is too TL;DR, for most folks, these days.
I've been having fun with my blog for many years. And now it's a big source of revenue for me. Still, I treat it almost the same way as before: a place where I get to share my ideas and discoveries.
The sheer act of writing helps me structure my thoughts and helps others grow. Win win!
I don't blog because, most of the time, I'm worried about what people might think. Sometimes I speak up in public and people are confused, so - I think - it will only be amplified online. Sometimes I want to share a bit of code, and I'm not sure if the formatting will please everyone. Or naming convention.
But most of all it's putting it all together.
There was this famous kid who only talked in tweets because he had ADHD. Sometimes series of tweets. Like 20 of them. But always in tweets, because that gave him control, and removed - or add, depends on your point of view - constraints.
Anyway - don't be like me. Speak up. Tell people what you want them to hear.
“It's redundant to say "I think" at any point in an opinion piece.”
“But is there still value in human produced writing? Subjectively, yes. Objectively? I'm not sure. I think there's a lot of personal value in writing though.”
There is value because I felt compelled to engage, but if it turns out you’re a bot then I’ll feel cheated and less likely to read other blog posts.
yea, I'm not saying there's no place for that phrase ever. But overusing it was a bad habit of mine and it ends up being unnecessary filler. My wording there was a bit exaggerated.
how will people sharpen their thinking if they don't write their own words? the value in human writing even with llms remains almost the same. you won't get better stuff without it
The beginning of this article neatly captures why writing your own thoughts -- as difficult as this can be sometimes -- is so crucial. One of my biggest fears from the unchecked proliferation of AI is society deciding that writing "the old way" should go the way of cursive and mentally calculating tips, that is, into the archives.
Ten years? I've been doing it for over twenty. Readership is something you have to chase, and if that's what you want, that's fine. But for some people, like me, it's the writing that's important.
I for thirty years. But usually only very short blogs about personally relevant events, such as buying books. I am not really interested whether it is read or not.
I've self hosted my blog across several platforms (Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, and now pelican) since about 2007 and the best thing I did was disable comments.
I had a friend message me saying they came across my blog googling how to run home assistant on k3s. And that's a satisfaction no money can buy.
Yeah I’ve occasionally mentioned things at work, and had someone say “I think I read a blog post about that once”. Only to discover they read about it on my blog! Incredibly satisfying.
I’ve also seen screenshots of my blog posts show up in random technical talks I happened to watch. I want to shout at the screen - “That was meeeee!”
When I write in my native tongue I avoid mentionning myself and try to disappear from the text; "I", "me", "my" is forbidden and also I try to compress sentences into the smallest most precise set of words — being precise and concise is the funniest writing game.
I felt this. The had the same experience when I blogged some 15 years ago now. Different times, same ghost town, but still had good content and useful information that I could look back on to jog my own memory. So it’s good to keep a diary. It’s usefulness is useful to you if you let it.
It seems like the author wants writing to be a bigger component of their life than it is. I hope the author is able to accomplish that goal. Maybe 100x their output and turn their blog into something a few people read. Hopefully the "20 years of writing a blog nobody reads" is a revelrous experience for the author's handful of readers.
You do realise there are AI checkers online.
https://www.zerogpt.com/ assesses this content as: 27.49% ChatGPT
While this writer obviously had a lot of input into the model, they even state (or more accurately according to zerogpt, ChatGPT wrote this whole paragraph) "The writing process should be highly iterative", so they have added their own flavour into the writing, but it is still, (probably not for much longer) but still obvious when this is used.
Great observation! Not only does ChatGPT produce seemingly human-authored output—humans can also produce ChatGPT-style output.
If you really want to fly below the radar you can even include instructions to adopt a certain writing style, e.g.: you can tell it to use a Gen-Z style with minimal formatting.
Period (.) ends the sentence, comma (,) breaks up the sentence. If the next sentence is closely related, end the sentence with a semi-colon (;). For every other type of break--especially those that resemble the natural and chaotic shifts of thought we all have--use an em-dash. (Oh, and put text you want to be optionally skipped in parenthesis.)
Em-dash is probably the most natural punctuation; it best matches the kinds of shifts our brain does when thinking.
It may be due to AI proliferation, or the culturural bias I have, but I increasingly find em-dashes jarring.
As you point out, authors use them for the "natural and chaotic shifts of thought we all have" and when there are lots of these shifts it feels like I have to keep track of multiple conversations at once.
For example, in the article we have:
If your goal is to have other people read—and hopefully enjoy—your writing, you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
When I read this I instinctively pause the 'main' thought/voice, read the aside, then re-establish my train of thought. In my opinion the sentence reads just as well without the aside:
If your goal is to have other people read and enjoy your writing you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
[edit - putting comma back in to break up the long sentence]
If your goal is to have other people read and enjoy your writing, you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
I think this is the only aside formatted like this in the article. The other em-dashes take the place of pauses in sentences, places I would normally use a comma or semicolon, or are used to introduce a list where I would typically use a colon.
Again this is probably a cultural thing, maybe a reaction to AI as well, but I find the em-dash a lot more though-interrupting than the other punctuation choices and I wonder if it's something I'll get used to or not.
I think I took out an extra comma too, which hurts readability.
Personally I write with too many asides, normally done with commas and parentheses. It's a comforting habit to fall into, and makes getting your thoughts out so much easier, at the expense of interrupting the reader's train of thought.
I don't normally notice when I'm writing with asides so the jarring em-dashes were a good reminder to try and edit them out where I can.
It's okay. Give it a few years and every writing style will be being used by AI. We'll then be able to use whatever style we like as no one will be able to tell our writing from AI anyway.
Agreed. I've used the em dash for well over a decade and love it, but am having to train myself to not use it simply to not appear as though my text is written by AI.
At least avoiding the "it's not just that X, it's Y" style that AI loves is easy enough!
Yeah, just writing in Word (and few other) will get your - turned into em dashes. Personally I hate them. Mostly coz of random editors making GNU cmdline options into emdash and so breaking copying but I also think they are ugly, way too long in most fonts
I don't know when the phrase "em dash" got popular. It was probably due to web development, because, unless you were into typesetting, nobody knew what "em" was. We always just called them dashes--two hyphens make a dash.
It has nothing to do with literacy, the em-dash simply is not on the standard US QWERTY keyboard. This means that people who purposefully use it, either have to copy-paste it from somewhere or (if they-re on Windows), use "Alt + 0 1 5 1". This is very obviously not a natural behaviour that 'literate' people use when they write.
You can type "--" in most writing software and it will turn into an em-dash. On a Mac, this includes TextEdit by default, or literally every text input field if you enable the "smart dashes" setting. I can type — right now in my web browser with two presses on my ordinary laptop keyboard and no memorizing character ID numbers, not exactly rocket science.
If you're using Word or other fancy word processors, you don't even have to type two hyphens. One will do, and it looks at the grammar and changes to the correct type of dash for you automatically.
Have all the people parroting "dash means it was written by ChatGPT" never used a word processor?
> Have all the people parroting "dash means it was written by ChatGPT" never used a word processor?
Probably not, this is "HACKER" News, if I type two n-dashes on a website, I EXPECT two n-dashes, otherwise things like HTML comments would break the page.
<!-- This is a HTML comment for your reference -->
The compose key and Ctrl+K in Vim both assume the use of Linux, or janky 3rd party software. Compose is the same argument I have already covered with Windows, you need to enter a cryptic key-combination into the keyboard, which is not intuitive.
As for the Vim argument, I'm struggling to work out how to use Vim to type on here? Perhaps you could shed some light? I suppose you could yank-put it, but I fail to see how that is less effort than copy-paste, the other argument I already covered.
If you're writing in MS Word, LibreOffice, or most word processors, typing a word and then two dashes and then a word, without any spaces, like--this will generate an em dash automatically. I learned how to do it in Freshman English in high school. Though I was also taught to double space after a period.
To revise GP's comment: it’s just less computer literate people feeling the need to out themselves.
Pandoc has had "smart" typography[0] which generates em-dash and en-dash for a long time. I found a forum post for 2011 where people were discussing em dashes and such. That thread indicates that John Gruber created a Markdown extension in 2004 which was already handling en and em dashes[2].
People aren't likely to pre-type their HN and reddit comments in a word processor though, so when you see them on such sites, it's a good indication that the comment came from an LLM and not a genuine person.
The compose key on Linux makes deliberate use much easier (rather than automatic replacement which often triggers when I don't want it). There's a compose key utility for Windows, but has some minor annoyances like many input (mouse or keyboard) macro extender applications.
It's not just less literate, it's also people who feel the need to be amateur prosecutors.
It's the same thing as judging people who wear their hair too long, or wear pajamas on the plane, or who wear pants that are too baggy, or who have children out of wedlock, etc. Some people are deeply convinced that society is on the decline and that they have a mission to ensure everyone else stays in line.
I will never not find it insane that in college they have word minimums for essays, instead of maximums. Imo going to college ruins many people's ability to write clearly.
I definitely had classes in college that had maximums as well (often assignments were supposed to be 7-10 pages, for example), but generally it's unnecessary and most people struggle to meet the minimums.
Cool. I know 1 person read my WEB site, they sent me a email :) But I do not keep track so I have no idea nor do I really care. So now you have 1 more who read it.
But since then I moved it to Gemini, the real Gemini, not google's thing. I find that far easier to maintain.
Have you considered that your thoughts on Writing Well might be wrong, and that's why people don't read your blog? I tuned out after realizing you have no idea what you're talking about.
> But is there a real connection between being wrong and not being read or are you yourself wrong ?
You don’t need to be a standup comedian yourself to spot bad comedy.
> Furthermore, I doubt there are any chances "right/wrong" applies to aesthetical types of philosophical discussions.
It’s hard to figure out what readers want because you don’t get direct feedback. But if you spend any amount of time in front of an audience, it becomes incredibly clear that some things work on stage better than others. I truly believe charisma is a learnable skill. By treating it as talent we deprive people who aren’t charismatic the chance to improve. Writing is just the same. Claiming that there’s no “right/wrong” here implies that it’s impossible to learn to write in a more engaging way. And that’s obviously false.
I did a clowning course a few years ago. In one silly exercise we all partnered up. Each couple were given a tennis ball, and we had to squish the ball between our foreheads so it wouldn’t fall. And like that, move around the room. Afterwards the teacher got half the class on stage and do it again, while everyone else watched. Then the audience got to vote on which couple we liked the most. It was surreal - almost everyone voted on the same pair. Those two in particular were somehow more interesting than everyone else. In that room there was a right and a wrong way to wordlessly hold a tennis ball between two people’s faces. And we all agreed on what it was.
> You don't need to be a standup comedian yourself to spot bad comedy.
I am not a native english speaker, I don't know anything about humourous form of language in that tongue.
Charisma depends on your audience, and audiences can differ quite a lot. There is no "right/wrong" because what please you as an audience may be considered wrong by another one.
"Writing in a more engaging way" aka changing your conceptions of what is right/wrong in order to conform to the current cultural supremacia that is built up everyday by pushing some kind of fast-food culture or idk.
Your story is interesting, and I don't understand how you could be surprised : people that go to clowning classes can share the same taste about what is good/bad ? That's not a very surprising fact ! If you had told me that they were people from different cultures ...
Do you think Baudelaire cared about engagement ? You talked like there were no way taste could dramatically change to the point "ugly" is becoming "good" or vice-versa. Some of the writers and artists I like the most braved the taste™ of the different hegemonic culture of their time, and just trusted their own intuition of what they did want to express, say, create.
Marcel Duchamp is a great example of how a mid level joke can change the art world suddenly (and people's taste with it).
> My goal now is to use less words to convey an idea. Everyone's interpretation of words is different, so using more precise language will just muddle your ideas.
It's easy to lose yourself in a sentence if it's not clearly thought out. Something about talking more to mask ones ignorance, or something like that. Forcing yourself to use short sentences a la simple English snaps you out of that.
Writing down opinions on things have done wonders for my ability to reason about them, especially when the opinions are built on 10 years of "hunch" and no discussion.
My point is that you don't need a massive audience. If you can reach one person and make them laugh, or teach someone something new, or give someone hope when they really needed it, then your writing will be worth it.
And the book it led to is 101 Amazing Sights of the Night Sky: https://www.amazon.com/101-Amazing-Sights-Night-Sky/dp/15919...
Neither is very popular, but it was a lot of fun.
The whole question of how you get in front of the right people and tweak your message based on their reactions, and then setup a routine so you have a dependable performance-audience, all seem to be lost on many folks.
I think that's not due to algorithmic intervention of product design etc., I think people are just tired. The novelty of shouting at strangers on the internet has worn off - how many internet fights have we gotten into that did nothing in the end except waste time? It's only worse with a coin flip's chance of the other person being an LLM. We're all tired.
I'm curious if the decline in reacting is matched by a decline in replying and posting in general.
Anyways, I worry that apathy is on the rise as we get overwhelmed with the rate of change and uncertainty in the 2020s and I'm working pretty hard to fight that apathy and bring more empathy, so if you're interested, please reach out to me the contact info in my bio.
[0]: https://das.psy.ed.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SelfDAS....
It's just hard to justify engaging. Worst case, I get a fight on my hands with someone who's as dogmatic as they are wrong, which is both frequent and also a complete waste of my time. (A tech readership is always going to veer hard into the well, akshually...) Most likely case, I get fictitious internet points. Which - I won't lie - tickle my lizard brain, just as they do everyone else's. But they don't actually achieve anything meaningful.
Best case is that I learn something. Realistically, this happens vanishingly infrequently, and the signal-noise ratio is much, much worse than if I just pulled a book off my shelf.
I suppose this is all an artifact of time and experience. Maybe I've just picked all the low-hanging fruit, and so I no longer have the patience to watch people endlessly repost the same xkcd strips from fifteen years ago, navel-gaze about tabs or spaces, share thrilling new facts that I have in fact known for many decades, etc. And while I'm very excited for them to discover all these things anew (and anew... and anew...), it's just not a good use of my time and patience to participate.
"Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you"."
I'm using writing as an outlet for an active mind these days. Thoughts that seem important to me and need to come out even if there is nobody there to read them.
Some of my worst habits formed seeing early posts go viral and then getting addicted to that endorphin hit. The amount of time I wasted checking analytics and new subs would probably equal the time it would take me to write 10 more posts or read a couple books.
But congrats at sticking to it for 10 years!
My stuff is too TL;DR, for most folks, these days.
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany
The sheer act of writing helps me structure my thoughts and helps others grow. Win win!
https://dsebastien.net
What I did a while ago was splitting notes and articles: https://notes.dsebastien.net
Publishing unpolished notes is a great way to remove needless pressure
I have a lot to say. About lot of things.
I don't blog because, most of the time, I'm worried about what people might think. Sometimes I speak up in public and people are confused, so - I think - it will only be amplified online. Sometimes I want to share a bit of code, and I'm not sure if the formatting will please everyone. Or naming convention.
But most of all it's putting it all together.
There was this famous kid who only talked in tweets because he had ADHD. Sometimes series of tweets. Like 20 of them. But always in tweets, because that gave him control, and removed - or add, depends on your point of view - constraints.
Anyway - don't be like me. Speak up. Tell people what you want them to hear.
“But is there still value in human produced writing? Subjectively, yes. Objectively? I'm not sure. I think there's a lot of personal value in writing though.”
There is value because I felt compelled to engage, but if it turns out you’re a bot then I’ll feel cheated and less likely to read other blog posts.
I've been blogging since 2006 and I feel the same way.
good times.
I had a friend message me saying they came across my blog googling how to run home assistant on k3s. And that's a satisfaction no money can buy.
I’ve also seen screenshots of my blog posts show up in random technical talks I happened to watch. I want to shout at the screen - “That was meeeee!”
While this writer obviously had a lot of input into the model, they even state (or more accurately according to zerogpt, ChatGPT wrote this whole paragraph) "The writing process should be highly iterative", so they have added their own flavour into the writing, but it is still, (probably not for much longer) but still obvious when this is used.
If you really want to fly below the radar you can even include instructions to adopt a certain writing style, e.g.: you can tell it to use a Gen-Z style with minimal formatting.
I have a deep love for em and en dashes--you can see heavy usage in my writing that's 10 years older than chatgpt.
My love for the dashes hasn't gone, but now I use a double dash instead so I am not immediately labelled as an AI.
Period (.) ends the sentence, comma (,) breaks up the sentence. If the next sentence is closely related, end the sentence with a semi-colon (;). For every other type of break--especially those that resemble the natural and chaotic shifts of thought we all have--use an em-dash. (Oh, and put text you want to be optionally skipped in parenthesis.)
Em-dash is probably the most natural punctuation; it best matches the kinds of shifts our brain does when thinking.
As you point out, authors use them for the "natural and chaotic shifts of thought we all have" and when there are lots of these shifts it feels like I have to keep track of multiple conversations at once.
For example, in the article we have:
If your goal is to have other people read—and hopefully enjoy—your writing, you should make an effort to edit your thoughts.
When I read this I instinctively pause the 'main' thought/voice, read the aside, then re-establish my train of thought. In my opinion the sentence reads just as well without the aside:
[edit - putting comma back in to break up the long sentence] I think this is the only aside formatted like this in the article. The other em-dashes take the place of pauses in sentences, places I would normally use a comma or semicolon, or are used to introduce a list where I would typically use a colon.Again this is probably a cultural thing, maybe a reaction to AI as well, but I find the em-dash a lot more though-interrupting than the other punctuation choices and I wonder if it's something I'll get used to or not.
Personally I write with too many asides, normally done with commas and parentheses. It's a comforting habit to fall into, and makes getting your thoughts out so much easier, at the expense of interrupting the reader's train of thought.
I don't normally notice when I'm writing with asides so the jarring em-dashes were a good reminder to try and edit them out where I can.
At least avoiding the "it's not just that X, it's Y" style that AI loves is easy enough!
The latter is barely used, but is the right way to indicate dates like 2023-25.
The more you know!
If you're using Word or other fancy word processors, you don't even have to type two hyphens. One will do, and it looks at the grammar and changes to the correct type of dash for you automatically.
Have all the people parroting "dash means it was written by ChatGPT" never used a word processor?
Probably not, this is "HACKER" News, if I type two n-dashes on a website, I EXPECT two n-dashes, otherwise things like HTML comments would break the page.
<!-- This is a HTML comment for your reference -->
As for the Vim argument, I'm struggling to work out how to use Vim to type on here? Perhaps you could shed some light? I suppose you could yank-put it, but I fail to see how that is less effort than copy-paste, the other argument I already covered.
To revise GP's comment: it’s just less computer literate people feeling the need to out themselves.
[0] https://pandoc.org/demo/example33/7.1-typography.html
[1] https://pandoc-discuss.narkive.com/PHmQaAgM/en-dashes-vs-em-...
[2] https://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/
A lot of people who care about typography/grammar have spent a moment to learn to do this. Once learned, you can use it for the rest of your life.
It's the same thing as judging people who wear their hair too long, or wear pajamas on the plane, or who wear pants that are too baggy, or who have children out of wedlock, etc. Some people are deeply convinced that society is on the decline and that they have a mission to ensure everyone else stays in line.
It's been that way throughout history.
But it's not the people who write them, but those who sell the LLMs trained on those blogs.
https://www.rxjourney.net/
But since then I moved it to Gemini, the real Gemini, not google's thing. I find that far easier to maintain.
Furthermore, I doubt there are any chances "right/wrong" applies to aesthetical types of philosophical discussions.
You don’t need to be a standup comedian yourself to spot bad comedy.
> Furthermore, I doubt there are any chances "right/wrong" applies to aesthetical types of philosophical discussions.
It’s hard to figure out what readers want because you don’t get direct feedback. But if you spend any amount of time in front of an audience, it becomes incredibly clear that some things work on stage better than others. I truly believe charisma is a learnable skill. By treating it as talent we deprive people who aren’t charismatic the chance to improve. Writing is just the same. Claiming that there’s no “right/wrong” here implies that it’s impossible to learn to write in a more engaging way. And that’s obviously false.
I did a clowning course a few years ago. In one silly exercise we all partnered up. Each couple were given a tennis ball, and we had to squish the ball between our foreheads so it wouldn’t fall. And like that, move around the room. Afterwards the teacher got half the class on stage and do it again, while everyone else watched. Then the audience got to vote on which couple we liked the most. It was surreal - almost everyone voted on the same pair. Those two in particular were somehow more interesting than everyone else. In that room there was a right and a wrong way to wordlessly hold a tennis ball between two people’s faces. And we all agreed on what it was.
I am not a native english speaker, I don't know anything about humourous form of language in that tongue.
Charisma depends on your audience, and audiences can differ quite a lot. There is no "right/wrong" because what please you as an audience may be considered wrong by another one. "Writing in a more engaging way" aka changing your conceptions of what is right/wrong in order to conform to the current cultural supremacia that is built up everyday by pushing some kind of fast-food culture or idk.
Your story is interesting, and I don't understand how you could be surprised : people that go to clowning classes can share the same taste about what is good/bad ? That's not a very surprising fact ! If you had told me that they were people from different cultures ...
Do you think Baudelaire cared about engagement ? You talked like there were no way taste could dramatically change to the point "ugly" is becoming "good" or vice-versa. Some of the writers and artists I like the most braved the taste™ of the different hegemonic culture of their time, and just trusted their own intuition of what they did want to express, say, create.
Marcel Duchamp is a great example of how a mid level joke can change the art world suddenly (and people's taste with it).
What?