Henrik Karlsson @phokarlsson 2025-05-07
“Don’t think, look!” might be the most useful piece of writing advice you can squeeze into 3 words. So much bad writing comes from people moving words about on the page, instead of staring at the real thing and then adjusting their words to fit it.
ivan @IvanVendrov 2025-05-08
learning to sketch has felt like better training for writing (and for science, for that matter) because I really can’t fool myself about capturing the details accurately. writing has much worse feedback loops - you get many key details wrong but if it sounds nice people applaud
Henrik Karlsson @phokarlsson 2025-05-08
I do some “sketching” but for writing, that is, going around and looking at stuff and trying to write and edit until what I write matches what I see. if nothing else, it makes me humble about how horribly off my first attempts are, and how much of that I’d miss by not checking
ivan @IvanVendrov 2025-05-08
I wonder how to get better feedback loops for writing. Like how do I actually know whether these words, when read by someone else (who exactly?), will create precisely the impression I meant to create or communicate precisely the experience I’ve had?
Henrik Karlsson @phokarlsson 2025-05-08
this part is hard. I don’t think you can solve it in general, because of context collapse. but have a few readers give you detailed feedback so you notice what you miss or where they are confused etc, if you do that 50 times, I think it helps a bit
༜三世青波༜ @humani_nihil_ 2025-05-08
yesssss