I agree with every point Reginald makes but (and I am being nitpicky here) the form of the story - the seeming overtailored parable nature of it, of the kind you'd find in the Reader's Digest or a religious tract - rubs me ever so slightly the wrong way.
I could have done without all the fake (or seemingly fake anyway) dialogue between the Wooster/Oscar etc and would have preferred a straightforward "This is what I(Reginald) think" mode.
Imagine pg writing his essays in the form of "Paul wrote an ecommerce site in Lisp while Peter used C++. When Paul met Peter's wife Rosa in a coffee shop he asked her why Peter was looking so haggard and she said 'he is working through the night fixing bugs and not getting enough sleep. Would you mind talking to him? ..' "
Again, this is a very minor nitpick, just consider this feedback from one reader. I am probably considerably outnumbered by the people who like this "story" form better (and that is perfectly fine). Of course it is completely Reginald's prerogative to pick any style he wants.
I understand your nitpick (and the post could have been a lot shorter had raganwald opted to use a different style).
However, the main benefit of the story format (to me at least) is that the underlying message is so much more memorable. I'll probably forget the names of the characters and some of the detail but I'll certainly remember the point.
More importantly perhaps, is that I'll be able to re-tell the story to others (in some form). Expecially if I'm trying to convince them of this view point.
Stories are easier to remember and share (and it's one reason that telling stories about your products is better than, say, a feature list).
The writing style reminded me a lot of the book "Leadership and self-deception" (http://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Self-Deception-Getting-out-...) in which a guy shows up at a new job and gets a day-long welcoming from the CEO, during which they slowly go through the idea of putting people in boxes and what to do about it.
The ending of raganwald's post especially was similar in tone with "You belong here. We'll do great things together".
edit: "they slowly go through the idea of putting people in boxes and what to do about it" Hmm, this sounds kind of odd when you don't know the book I guess :) To clarify: in the book, you put people "in a box" basically when you have prejudices about them and look at things through that angle only. Or something like that.
It seems very common among books targeted at CEO-types ("Be The Hero" being the one I read lately). I don't know what it is about managers that means they like stories more than explication, but it seems to be common perception.
Stories can be useful. You could say [arbitrary example] that "I'm trustworthy", or you could tell a story of the time you were given privileged information and didn't use it for personal gain.
The story is much more convincing, because it invokes empathy from the audience. The trick is to tell a good story. That means understanding plot, characters, tempo, your audience, and so on.
Not saying it's the be-all and end-all, but when done right stories have their place.
I dislike the story form too, and I can explain why. The style gives the impression that Reginald is claiming "this really happened, and those people used this technique, and they lived happily ever after – so if it worked for them, it will work for you; give this technique a try". But this tale never happened, so that implied argument is a lie. This story forces me to put on my "disbelieve, disbelieve, disbelieve" mental filters as I read, so I can remind myself that the story does not have the grounds in reality it claims, lest I believe it wrongly. This extra effort would not be necessary if Reginald just claimed what he claims straight out, and then perhaps described his grounds for belief in those claims. The unnecessary extra effort of skepticality is why I don't like the story form in this case.
The style gives the impression that Raganwald is claiming "this really happened, and those people used this technique, and they lived happily ever after – so if it worked for them, it will work for you; give this technique a try
Respectfully, no it doesn’t. Try showing the story to one hundred randomly selected people and ask whether they think this really happened. I think you will find that there are a few people who have a certain type of extremely literal brain who don’t take well to parables, to satire, or anything else that isn’t a direct recitation of facts.
The fact that such people are in a minority doesn’t invalidate their (or your) feelings, but it is important to recognize that the feelings you have are not universal, just as I must recognize that not everybody likes the format.
I don't like that we can't question this story because it's fictional. It has legs because of the way it is written, but no one can jab or poke at it without the obvious "well, it's just a story, man" line. I hate outs like that. It's been mentioned that there is an overall religious feel to these articles. I think it's because religion always has an out when it needs to explain something using evidence. Then there is the article title, "I don't hire unlucky people" with "raganwald's posterous" as the header. Not sure how someone could glance at this and determine it was fictional - but I think you know that.
> The fact that such people are in a minority doesn’t invalidate their (or your) feelings
Well, we don't know if they are the minority or not. No one has really taken a poll. I'll say I've found the same lineage in your articles. They tend to play on the emotionally-binding do the right thing narrative - which is fine, but the articles always conclude with this overall "so that's why you have to do it this way" feeling. Morals aside, there's really no validation to these ideas. It's one thing to tell a story and have a happy ending, but the subject matter is often timely and succinct to current events - making it (in perspective of the moment) newsworthy. I understand it is easy to talk around that, so I guess one would have to ask "Why do you write in this way?". If your articles are politically-driven, then why write fiction? If story-telling is your angle, why the call to arms narrative?
This isn't to say your writing isn't good - to the contrary. But if we're talking about whether your articles could be confusing to some – I'd say I agree.
I read a bestselling short story once about two mice, one of whom ventured out into the world to find a new place to live, while the other stayed put. The one who abandoned everything came out of it better in the end, and so the moral of the story was that we should all abandon what works in hopes of stumbling on to something better.
I detested the book, and will instantly have a lower opinion of someone if I see it in their bookshelf. It seems to me that it was written as a short story to avoid arguing for the decisions the characters make. raganwald's story was better, but still vulnerable to the story format, where dei ex machina reign supreme.
That said, story formats have strong advantages as well, such as capturing attention – but they don't come for free.
The author sees his time better spent addressing each comment rather than just do something simple like using the Posterous tagging feature. A 'fiction' tag would be sufficient and no one would be confused. I doubt the author would tolerate end-user confusion in his software, why defend it in this case? His blog is full of non-fictional, fictional, opinion, etc. There is no obvious delineation for those who don't read his material and the fix is easy.
If you want evidence, I think you should look elsewhere besides Hacker News. It’s a nice place full of very smart people, but posts containing empirical evidence gathered under controlled conditions are few and far between.
I've read plenty of articles about political, corporate, structural viewpoints – all with details of recent experience, personal findings and data on HN. I'd say fictional short-stories would be the odd man out at HN.
How does it being fiction stop people jabbing and poking at it? And how have you read this far down the thread and still held that conclusion?
As for glancing at it and knowing that it is fictional, it is fairly obvious in the first paragraph, even without the names, purely by the style of writing.
I found the style grating as well, but not because I thought it might have happened or even that you intended for me to think so. It was more that I found the parable style condescending. Heavy-handed and self-indulgent are a couple of hyphenated terms that might apply to some small extent.
I probably wouldn't have copped to it quite as fast if you hadn't named one of the characters Bertie Wooster, which was a lovely bit of signaling. Good job there.
Saying that I think the story really happened is an exaggeration in my case. Obviously I recognized that the story was false strongly enough for me to know that I should put my skepticism filters on. I knew intellectually the story didn't happen soon after starting reading, from the style of writing. But it took extra, conscious effort to ensure that that understanding was shared by my more base word-understanding mind, too. Basically, I read in words as truth, and have to manually tag each thought as "dubious" after reading them. Or perhaps I would still disbelieve what I read even if I didn't consciously attempt to disbelieve it, but consciously disbelieving what I read is a much-practiced habit that I would find hard to stop, so I still prefer straightforwardly-presented arguments to fictional-story arguments.
Apart from that misunderstanding, I do find it plausible that, as you hypothesize, most people need less effort to disbelieve what they read than me.
I'm beginning to feel the style is a bit overwrought. Once in a while, it's ok. I feel as though the style is. Wing overused. Just personal preference I guess.
I preferred the parable, personally -- I think it's just a preference thing. Viewing things as an interaction, even just a sort of Socratic dialogue, works well at least for my mind.
I agree with you on the preference, but I'd like to add that sometimes a format preference exists only as a way of allowing the author to express their ideas succinctly.
As much as I may dislike the storyteller format of the article, philosophically speaking, I have a practical inability to read other, drier essays. And then there are essays which have no reasonable usage of paragraphs and sentences to encapsulate or describe ideas, etc. Compared to those, I would pick a storyteller format.
"As much as I may dislike the storyteller format of the article,"
Thinking about it a bit more, there is nothing wrong with the story format. It is just that (I think) it doesn't work in this case.
The story with "He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone" in probably better than a bald statement of "don't be a hypocrite" (or whatever the moral of the story is supposed to be). But when you are hearing the story for the first time, you are drawn into it and held there till it ends and then you snap out of it and you are back in the real world.
It is just that in this case, I, the reader, was made aware that he is reading a story while I was reading it (vs being sucked into it) and every time a point came up I felt like I was being bludgeoned with it.
But then again, I thought "Godel, Escher, Bach" was pretentious and wordy, so it is highly probable that I just have weird tastes.
Again, I don't want to harp on this too much. Just offering some feedback which may (or may not ) be useful to Reginald.
I agree with your nitpick, but he almost makes up for it by making me read Ernestine's first sentence in the voice of Ernie from Sesame Street. (I assume that must have been intentional - I'm incapable of not doing that with a sentence that starts with "Bert,")
yes, something like that. I find the style much more natural and less grating. The 'parable' format 'feels' (to me, purely subjectively etc etc) like chalk screeching on blackboard, obscuring the (very valid) substance of the argument.
Or maybe it is just a matter of better technique. There may be a way of telling a story to make the same points without the reader being jerked out of his involvement with the material,and being made aware he is reading a story. I don't know.
Socratic dialogue is a good way to move an essay along under the guise of a narrative. I wasn’t bothered by it, even though I usually prefer something more direct.
Stories are powerful and can aid in remembering and understanding the message - but can be taken too far. For example I found the scenes of the lead character's marriage problems in 'The Goal' quite off-putting and unnecessary.
It actually helped me visualize the conversations better and follow the thought process thinking about them as Sesame Street characters. I don't know why.
I could have done without all the fake (or seemingly fake anyway) dialogue between the Wooster/Oscar etc and would have preferred a straightforward "This is what I(Reginald) think" mode.
Imagine pg writing his essays in the form of "Paul wrote an ecommerce site in Lisp while Peter used C++. When Paul met Peter's wife Rosa in a coffee shop he asked her why Peter was looking so haggard and she said 'he is working through the night fixing bugs and not getting enough sleep. Would you mind talking to him? ..' "
Again, this is a very minor nitpick, just consider this feedback from one reader. I am probably considerably outnumbered by the people who like this "story" form better (and that is perfectly fine). Of course it is completely Reginald's prerogative to pick any style he wants.