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How do you write a lengthy, informative comment/post?
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this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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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:
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:
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.
Well, that explains a lot.
Frankly the way that I handle syntax nowadays is completely heterodox - the tree is just a convenient way to represent some pseudocode-like "rules", nothing else. My framework is completely proto-scientific and it probably has more holes than a sieve, but it isn't a big deal since my main area of interest is Historical Linguistics anyway.
On pragmatics: it's a really amazing field to dig into, but professors with "strange interpretations" are a dime a dozen. Often because they're too stubborn to ditch their favourite framework even when it doesn't work for something - for example, trying to explain politeness expressions through the maxims won't work, and yet some still try to do it.
Tree Diagrams can be useful to structure a sentence, but the UG system of "assume one system fits every language cuz inherent ability" is bad.
If you want to check your understanding of how phrases, clauses and words connect to each other in a certain language, trees can be pretty powerful.
To the latter point: My biggest gripe with linguistics is the tendency to boil everything down to a simple system.
Do you want to elaborate more on how politeness cant be explained by gricean maximes?
The Gricean maxims only handle the informative part of a conversation; they don't handle, for example, the emotional impact of the utterance on the hearer, or the social impact on the speaker. As such, in situations where politeness is a concern, you'll see people consistently violating those maxims.
I'll give you an example. Suppose two people in a room: Alice and Bob. Alice has a lot of cake, she's eating some, and Bob is craving cake.
If Bob were to ask Alice for some cake, Bob could simply say "gimme cake". It fits the four maxims to the letter - and yet typically people don't do this, they request things through convoluted ways, like "You wouldn't mind sharing some cake with me, would you?" (violating the maxim of manner), or even "You know, I was in a rush today, so I had no breakfast..." (implying "I'm hungry", and violating the maxims of quantity and relation).
To handle why Bob would do this, you need to backseat Grice's Logic for a moment and use another framework - such as Brown and Levinson's politeness theory, it explains stuff like this really well.
This is probably obvious for you (and for me), and yet you still see some pragmaticists shoehorning everything into Grice's logic. Or some doing the exact opposite and shoehorning it into Austin's speech acts, or B&L Politeness Theory, etc. It sounds a lot like "I got a hammer, so everything must be a nail".
Yes, yes, and yes. You can see Language (as human faculty) as a single system but, if you do so, any accurate representation of that system is so big that it's completely useless, like a map as large as the territory.
That's already a tendency in Linguistics in general, but in the case of the generativists it's their explicit goal.
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.