My Writing Style

Bill,

I did graduate from college and do work in the hospital. Drs, nurses, and other allied health professionals seem to write in fragmented sentences. I seem to write the same way after 27 yrs writing in charts. I thank you for even caring about the readers on this forum and will read anything you write. Thanks again.

Bill,

I can honestly say as one of the “average” people on these forums I enjoy reading your posts, it really keeps me on my toes. Im pretty sure that Im not alone in saying that your advice is always good and appreciated in whatever forum you write.

So what if I dont know the meaning to a word in one of your posts, I can always google it and Ive learned something new (and probably useful).

Please keep writing the way you feel comfortable with. I for one, am eager to learn as much as possible from people like Prof X and yourself whenever I can.

Cheers for posting

bams

[quote]bwhitwell wrote:
Bill,

I did graduate from college and do work in the hospital. Drs, nurses, and other allied health professionals seem to write in fragmented sentences. I seem to write the same way after 27 yrs writing in charts. I thank you for even caring about the readers on this forum and will read anything you write. Thanks again.[/quote]

This is true when writing in charts because every word written has to be able to stand up in a court of law should the need ever arise. This internet site, however, is not being held to the scrutiny of a panel of researchers and writing like that, while possibly effective on some level, will not appeal to the greatest number of people.

If I felt the need to write like I do in patient charts, I would not write here. That is WORK to me and I doubt very many contributors would waste time trying to think about a post for several minutes before typing it up.

Like Bill seemed to get across, I type extremely fast also and if getting a point across required some extreme level of attention that slowed down my process, I would just avoid the matter completely.

didactic tongue puzzles always amuse, succinct answers seem to be key when responding to the questions that get recapitulated on a daily basis on T-Nation.

  1. FUCK YOU, EAT MORE! 2. TRAIN ARMS DIRECTLY DICK FACE! Examples 1 & 2 are examples of direct communication between sender and receiver with limited channel noise.

Bill, I do not have a problem with your writing style but understand your concern. I stopped posting for the most part because of the time it takes to try and make sure I am clear (and I still end up in an exchange with X to explain things further-which is always interesting). It is good for people to stretch their reading levels every once and a while. While many on this site might still be in school there is no reason why communication style needs to be overly simplified. If everything was at a fourth grade level we would all be perpetually fourth graders.

[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
(yes, for bb’ing forum)

Serious question:

Would it be better if I cleaned up my writing style in bb’ing forum posts?

There doesn’t seem to be an issue in Supplements forum posts. Likely it is because of the subject matter. Direct answers are generally suitable, and usually it is not necessary to have various qualifiers or to include parenthetical thoughts.

Same pretty much for Steroid forum posts.

However, in bb’ing there are qualifying factors all the time, and while many things can be satisfactorily said with simple statements that are left at that, very many times leaving statements at that will omit things that can be of key importance.

In fact, I expect that many times the most useful parts of my posts probably are the qualifiers and parenthetical thoughts. The content of the simple statements in most cases probably has been read before many times before in many places. So simply getting rid of these aspects of the posts is not I think the best solution. It would be possible however to present them in a better-written way.

When writing professionally, I work hard to keep sentences short, to minimize word count, and to minimize my chronic use of parenthetical statements. Doing a really good job of this is very time consuming and, frankly, it ain’t gonna happen on forum posts. On these, I tend to write almost exactly as I speak, which is much easier when turning out a lot of writing.

But if my posts really are problematic for many to read, I could spend an extra several minutes per post tightening them up. Though if multiplying by very many posts per day, which sometimes is the case, that adds up to quite a bit, so it’s not trivial.

Do many see a real need for that? Serious question. Thanks.[/quote]

I like reading your posts. They’re intelligent and on topic.

You do go overboard with the parenthetical statements. Sometimes it can be difficult to determine exactly what you’re trying to say.

I wouldn’t want to see Bill Roberts (or Prof X either) adjust their writing styles much.

At some point, the lowest common denominator becomes worthy of neglect. Or maybe not.

To be honest, I often find myself glossing over your posts because they are so verbose, and are so weighed down by grammatical correctness that they lack panache. You have great information, but it often reads like a long Al Gore speech.

Briefer is better. Share your insights, but keep it focused and inject a little personality every now and then.

Just out of curiosity do they pay you to post here? If they do (this is an
honest question) then fine worry about how you are being perceived. Otherwise if the
way you write now is the most efficient for you then keep doing that and spend
more time on doing things which pay the bills. My two cents.

Personally I have always found your posts to be a very good read. I like things that are intelligent and informative. If I don’t understand something I’ll either ask direct or do some research myself.

If something is long and I’m interested in the topic I’ll either read it then and there, or make a point to come back later. If I skim through and it’s not relevant to me then I’ll pass it by.

Either way, for me, it works if you keep your posts as they are.

Bill

Don’t change it. Your style doesn’t come across as too academic at all. In fact I think you ride the line between technical, and conversational.

[quote]Iron Dwarf wrote:
Bill

Don’t change it. Your style doesn’t come across as too academic at all. In fact I think you ride the line between technical, and conversational. [/quote]

Agreed. For this exact reason, you’re one of the few people who’s post I will stop and read carefully instead of just skimming. Your posts have substance, don’t change the style.

A note from one of the editors:

Don’t go changing, to try and please me
You never let me down before
Don’t imagine you’re too familiar
And I don’t see you anymore
I wouldn’t leave you in times of trouble
We never could have come this far
I took the good times, I’ll take the bad times
I’ll take you just the way you are.

(Cue saxophone).

[quote]pja wrote:
Just out of curiosity do they pay you to post here? If they do (this is an
honest question) then fine worry about how you are being perceived. Otherwise if the
way you write now is the most efficient for you then keep doing that and spend
more time on doing things which pay the bills. My two cents.
[/quote]

No, my income is identical whether I post or not.

Your point though is completely valid and why it is out of the question to spend really considerable time completely re-writing posts to make them clearer, as if they were articles; and certainly part of why I didn’t automatically decide to spend a few minutes extra cleaning them up if there wasn’t much need.

If there had been only one or two people put off by the things that I know could be better, and especially if those were people that mostly were saying so from the perspective of their opinions on how others would do with it, then it wouldn’t have been worth it. It would have made more sentence to continue to just type and hit submit.

However it’s clear thanks to the replies that many have helpfully provided that at least in some cases, a couple of extra minutes clean-up time will be worth it.

On the points that Iron Dwarf and Da Vinci made: I’m not planning to change content, only (now) to go back and see where sentences may be really ridiculously constructed and to rewrite them to be better. However as many of my sentences are really ridiculously constructed, it’s not a completely trivial task. :slight_smile:

[quote]forlife wrote:
To be honest, I often find myself glossing over your posts because they are so verbose, and are so weighed down by grammatical correctness that they lack panache. You have great information, but it often reads like a long Al Gore speech.[/quote]

Good point, but I’m always going to be tied to concerns such as the fact that when writing “you” in a post, or saying it to a person, the person just naturally has a tendency to believe that the reference is to him.

As a result, I employ awkward-seeming constructions, that perhaps no one else here does, such as “One cannot” if I mean a person in general and not the person I am replying to.

Sounding like Al Gore is a heavy price to pay indeed, but I just can’t bring myself to avoid these constructions that I feel have good reason behind them, as poorly as they may read.

Don’t worry Bill…I’m sure if your posts were too wordy, then the mods would gladly edit them for you.

[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
Thanks all.

From your responses and other past constructive comments, it does seem I should take the extra few minutes per post, where needed, to clean it up. I was reluctant to do so out of sheer laziness I guess and wanted to see if maybe it was only 1 or 2 that found problems. Clearly it’s more than that, and since I do know how to do better in this regard, I ought to.

Thanks also for the positive comments.

Jehovas, I would guess it is the often-extreme sentence length and the extremely frequent parenthetical thoughts that create the problem. There’s no doubt that shorter sentences are better, where possible, and parenthetical thoughts are best expressed separately. I just don’t think that way on the fly, and so when writing as fast as I type, it doesn’t come out that way.

I can see though that I ought to correct that. Thanks particularly to Professor X who has gently pointed this out several times where I was exceptionally unclear in the writing. I’ve been lazy and I guess needed further confirmation to actually correct this.
[/quote]

I have no issue at all with your writing, however being as concise as and compact as possible never hurts. Look at your demographic. They are going to have varying degrees of literacy and comprehension, I would suggesting aiming for “median” reader

[quote]Stronghold wrote:
Don’t worry Bill…I’m sure if your posts were too wordy, then the mods would gladly edit them for you.[/quote]

From what I’ve heard (seen), they are actually more fond of locking topics to further discussion and moving them halfway down the page so they get lost in the shuffle.

Bill, as far as what I am here to learn on these forums, you are “the man”. If this is how you naturally write to convey a point please don’t change a word. If I have to read an extra paragraph or two to catch a small piece of information, or have to re-read a couple of sentences to understand, I’m great with that. Please just keep doing what you’re doing, just like you’re doing it.

BIll,

What do you normally read? What genre of text (technical, academic, fiction, etc) comprises the majority of your reading?

Also, consider the medium in which you are communicating: an internet forum, where people skim posts, obsessively hit the refresh icon to see the latest posts, and post many nonsense and mundane responses.

In other words, forums for the most part are where people’s attention spans are brief, because most people will consider a forum such as this a casual environment (especially since it can be a place of recreation as much as anything else).

The nature of these forums will therefore affect most people’s default “lens” - a combination of their attention span and the value that they personally place on these forums - of interpretation, or how they will generally read a post, regardless of their education background.

There’s a fable in my culture:

An old man with a very long beard, one that he had never shaved nor trimmed, was once asked by a fellow villager,“How do you sleep with that beard? Do you tuck it under the sheets or do you lay it on top of them?”

The old man thought about it for the first time in his life. He couldn’t recall what had obviously become his habit. Would he lay it on top of the sheets or under them? He didn’t have an answer for his neighbor.

He became restless at night once he paid attention to his beard. He couldn’t fall asleep with his beard on top of the sheets and was equally restless when he’d tuck the beard under the sheets. Many sleepless nights went by until the old man decided to shave his beard and was able to sleep again.


Of course, the take away message should be that, once you want to cater to one crowd, not catering to other crowds will bother you.