As I understand it, the author was sharing the story to convince the audience he was a good writer and, thus, we should value his opinions on how to write non-fiction.
This was the intention. Originally it was more clear but I moved the other half of the story to the conclusion where it's even more evident that the stories were a way to build rapport and establish some kind of credibility.
I like these abrupt switches that tie-in later. Kind of like a b-roll but in text.
In history I noticed that articles tended to be introduced with some narrative that illustrated the central idea, then consolidated it through arguments that were in turn exemplified by historical facts and narrative, in order to end up explicitly stating the conclusion at the end. (This is a huge simplification but you get the idea). So for my essays I followed the same structure that the required reading had. That way I made sure that professors would like the style and pace.
The author was able to pass courses although the prof’s hated him thank to his skills as a writer and his style, which later allowed him to proceed to data engineering. The trunk here is explaining how he writes.
No you are not missing anything. This is a more recent bait-and-switch method of writing articles. I'm not sure where it comes from but if I had to be extra pessimist, I'd say it is a trope among failed writers. Sometimes they use narrative devices that work best in novels, but they end up being applied to normal every-day articles and the result is something that seems out of place.
Arguably if HN is to use LLMs to curate and administer submissions and comments (which it has been doing already), one would hope they can short-circuit this for all of us and scan the article/blog post, providing a summary directly underneath the submission/comment reply box. Reason being is, a lot of the time many paragraphs are spent belaboring one or two points that would best work in a tl;dr way and jump over these narrative passages, framings and backstories that serve very little to the points themselves.
Comments
Am I missing something or did the anecdote at the beginning have nothing to do with the rest?
As I understand it, the author was sharing the story to convince the audience he was a good writer and, thus, we should value his opinions on how to write non-fiction.
This was the intention. Originally it was more clear but I moved the other half of the story to the conclusion where it's even more evident that the stories were a way to build rapport and establish some kind of credibility.
I like these abrupt switches that tie-in later. Kind of like a b-roll but in text.
The author explains his form in the essay:
The author was able to pass courses although the prof’s hated him thank to his skills as a writer and his style, which later allowed him to proceed to data engineering. The trunk here is explaining how he writes.
No you are not missing anything. This is a more recent bait-and-switch method of writing articles. I'm not sure where it comes from but if I had to be extra pessimist, I'd say it is a trope among failed writers. Sometimes they use narrative devices that work best in novels, but they end up being applied to normal every-day articles and the result is something that seems out of place.
Arguably if HN is to use LLMs to curate and administer submissions and comments (which it has been doing already), one would hope they can short-circuit this for all of us and scan the article/blog post, providing a summary directly underneath the submission/comment reply box. Reason being is, a lot of the time many paragraphs are spent belaboring one or two points that would best work in a tl;dr way and jump over these narrative passages, framings and backstories that serve very little to the points themselves.
This is New Yorker style. Paint an elaborate scene and get to the point later on.
No. The New Yorker never gets to the point.
— Long time subscriber.
How should have the author written the article then for it to work better?
Well, isn't it related to writing ?