I agree that education is not storytelling, but I think that storytelling can be a useful tool for education.

A lot of Paul Graham and Joel Spolsky posts don't get straight to the point and usually do not follow an intro -> body -> conclusion format. A lot of them start with a story that makes the direction of the post unclear[0] or include long digressions whose value isn't immediately obvious.[1]

For a while, I struggled with this contradiction because I think good writing should quickly demonstrate the value a reader can expect, but I think Graham and Spolsky are excellent writers that frequently take their time in getting to their point.

The easy answer is that Graham and Spolsky are famous, so they can do whatever they want, and people will still read. I've come to think it's actually that writers like Graham and Spolsky are so good that the quality of the writing itself is the thing of value that keeps you interested even if you don't know what point they're going to make.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

[1] https://paulgraham.com/worked.html

My undergraduate research advisor told me "Papers and presentations are not murder mysteries." I try to keep that in mind whenever I approach explanatory writing, because the purpose is to help the audience reach understanding of where you ended up, not to replicate the epiphany you had yourself.

If I am reading a cookbook, tutorial, or reference to teach myself quickly so that I can accomplish something specific, I completely agree with you. Blog posts can teach something, of course, but when I choose to read a blog, I am hoping to experience a bit of the writer's personality and to be entertained in the process. Storytelling accomplishes both nicely. Also, when I read a blog post, I am not in a rush and don't want to feel like I should be.

I think the appropriate level of "storytelling" depends on the type of blog post. A "bug hunt" type of post is often told as a detective story. A benchmark post has almost zero storytelling. Different purposes warrant different approaches.

Following the sequence of a-ha moments in a field is often a useful way to make them happen in the student: at first people thought things stopped after you pushed on them, but then Newton and Galileo realised this was because of a thing called friction, and if there wasn't any friction things wouldn't stop, and this means if you shift your perspective you can change how fast things moved. Later on Maxwell found his equations implied a speed of electromagnetic waves, such as light, but couldn't figure out what perspective it was in. Michelson and Morley tested it and strangely found it was true in all perspectives at once, Einstein made mathematical sense out of that which causes weird effects like time dilation, and our GPS satellites prove time dilation is true.

twists and revelations are just unhelpful especially when someone is trying build a mental model, but I do think there's probably some overlap in pacing and I'll pieces together into a complicated model has some overlap with story telling, because there's definitely bad educational writing which is a slog to get through because they front load a lot of stuff without application.

I do find it kind of annoying when someone has a set of side characters they are trying convey the information through. Like it's cute the first few times you see it but after a while it's grating.

I do think some people for whatever reason also have no issue with the front loaded info dumps, maybe they are looking for a specific piece of information they want to pull not sure. I prefer something a bit structured while having the ability to zoom out and look for the piece later on.

Not everyone consumes information the same, so I don't know there's really a objective best way.

> LLMs have made this problem extremely worse. Imagine how'd you'd explain what an MCP is in a couple words and technically, then try to look it up. There's phone books worth of pages and text that never end up getting to the point

Also this, but I think this might be a result of models of poorly designed benchmarks and training that led to claude reading like an inner monologue and an exhaustive noncommittal statement being certain on very few things, leading a ton of unnecessary prefaces.

Totally agree, everything is getting turned into a clickbait. The worst is YouTube videos on educational/technical topics. Instead of getting to the point and explaining the main topic of the video they goes into a rambling of history of how everything started and keep on dragging the video to 20 mins when in reality it should have been max. 5min.

Same goes for some blog posts as well, could have been less than 500 words and instead it’s turned into a novel

There's phone books worth of pages and text that never end up getting to the point.

I don't know if it's still there, but Grammarly used to have an AI feature that specifically made text longer. It was literally a button that says "Make longer."

  > education is not storytelling 

  > People want to save "twists" and "revelations" for maximum impact and it's harmful.

So basically a goal is that I'll stop for questions at some point and if I'm successful there'll be a student that asks a question we've been building up to and that I'm about to ask and/or answer. But there shouldn't be a "plot twist". I'm not trying to surprise students (usually :), but rather the story should make sense. As an educator[0] my goal is to get students to remember certain things and ask the right questions (a skill that's non-obvious yet people are overly confident about their level).

A good example of story driven writing is Cropper's The Quantum Physicists: And an Introduction to Their Physics. I really enjoyed this in my undergrad because it not only taught the physics but taught it in a historical manner. I said there's compression in story telling and this style of teaching did a great job at motivation of why these physicists were asking these questions. It gave context. I honestly think it had a big impact on me and helped push me into research (I do ML, not physics).

Certainly there's a time and place for being terse and hyper fixated on the information you're trying to teach but often we're trying to do a lot more than that.

FWIW, I think LLMs are terrible at this. They make everything seem "exciting". When everything is "load bearing" then nothing is. They're really bad at the context and understanding the bigger picture. They're especially terrible at responding to a question with something like "keep that question in mind, we'll come back to it in next week's lecture"

[0] I'm currently in industry

[1] https://archive.org/details/bwb_S0-BVP-068

>saying what you'll say, say it, then conclude by saying what you said.

In other words, the clearest possible conveyance of information.

At some point the learners have to connect with "why" and do something with the information. Is it the teacher's problem if students have no connection with the information they are being fed? It seems you would say no, let the students deal with the trouble of caring about and connecting to the content. You may be right.

I think it's not a strict binary question. Clearly some stages of learning require lots of information (grammatical and mathematical rules, for example). But stories often provide the hook or opening where the information starts to matter to the learners, and that holds for how I want my LLM to feed me information. This does not mean I want flowery and gratuitously validating prose for every scenario. My account-level instructions for chatgpt say something like "talk like Data from Star Trek." I've rolled my eyes more than once at the AI slop analogies or the overdone AI ted talk approach to everything.

When I explain something I think it's always useful to exercise at least a modicum of empathy towards my audience - I have learned far too many times that, thorough as my givings forth have been, my listeners have not understood things I assumed they did. That's where story comes in, and the right story connects to things students care about.

The twists and turns delays, and forward-looking tantalizers used to be for maximum impact once upon a time, and are still for that reason (or else for shits and giggles) on ad-free sites.

Today, the circumlocution is to keep you on the page or video for as long as possible for maximum monetization.

In journalism this is called “burying the lead.”

> Like a good presentation you should start by saying what you'll say

This annoys me so much. Don't tell me what you're gonna say next, just fucking say it.

> Maybe someone can tell the LLM's about these anti-patterns, like, seriously, would it help?

In a way, by posting this article online the author has already done that.

i wonder how many of these are LLM-written.

I find that LLM-written software blog posts generally spend like 3x as many words as would be ideal, but of course take a lot more editing and care.

This is a pet peeve of mine when there is a news story, opinion piece, case study where they spend like several paragraphs (or much more) telling story like it was a novel when in reality you it about maybe one or two paragraphs explaining what happened to a particular person/couple/family etc. and then get into the facts.

It is a massive turn off for me and I just simply close the window if I find they don't get start getting to the point.

I am much more forgiving if the meandering intro is done by someone that is clearly just someone writing up their own work.

Not just bloggers either. One look at the average YouTube video, and you'd think most people making those things had never heard the word 'brevity' in their life.

Is blogging necessarily technical writing?

Unless this is meant sarcastically, it sounds like an antipattern. If that’s truly the sole purpose of the first sentence, you might as well drop it and start with the second. The first sentence instead also should have a purpose of its own.

Otherwise you end up with an article whose sole purpose is getting you to read it to its end, without accomplishing anything other than wasting your time.

Sure, if you want empty, soulless writing, akin to TikTok mind-rot and engagement bait. Get your reader's emotions up so they hate-read it. A/B test your blog for which sentences, jokes, and moral stances get the most engagement. Sell your soul to the lowest common denominator. To fight the AI slop, you must become the AI slop.

Or write something that actually provides value to your reader, communicate that value effectively, and trust your reader to recognize that value. Which would you rather read: writing that was optimized for psychologically capturing your eyeballs, or writing that was optimized for providing you something of value?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM

Thanks for the satire post, the person who persisted on Soylent for 30 days was a nice touch on the expertful trolling (by original definition, ones that let the in-the-knows see that you're joking).

"The 10 hottest new sentences about tech today. The sole purpose of sentence #7 will shock you."

Distract them by withholding information, so you feel like more of an expert than they are, and they don't have enough concrete info to form an attack plan.

An effective strategy for lots of higher tier management. For both good and bad reasons - often they don't want the details, they want to know that you know the details. You're being paid to know those details, after all.

Then the better option would be to quote a paragraph for the impatient reader and provide a link to the source for further reading.

That’s like saying there is no such thing as bad writing because people can write what they want.

I guess the author implies that a blog writer wants other people to engage with their articles. Without supplying any quantifiable evidence I wouldn't say I find it convincing, but I did stick around until the end of the article. That shows at the very least that the article was written in a way to keep me interested.

It doesn't really, as you can see in their traffic numbers. People are not stopping to use it because they dislike the platform (Most people would not even be aware of any moderation criticism, especially if they are just readers).

People are not using it any more as any AI assistant will give you the answer in seconds, perfectly adapted to your use case and with an easy way to ask follow up questions.

I don't see SO and software blog as interchangable things at all. SO is for seeking answers for specific problems, while blogs are for entertainment weaved with learning.

Do they? How would it be different?

I dunno. I know it makes me an enemy of humanity and all, but LLMs have mostly replaced Stack Overflow and dev blogs for me. A dialog with something that writes well (or can take a totally different swing at an explanation if the first one isn't so good), has expert-level knowledge, and isn't egotistical. But maybe most of all the dialog part.

Anyway, I'm learning so much more so much better than I ever have before. Turns out the ultimate slop tools are also the ultimate learning tools if you use 'em right.

In 2021 maybe.

Today LLMs have completely replaced the original role of StackOverflow.

Curiously, over the past year I’ve found myself clicking through to read the article before the comments if the link looks like a personal blog. This is a huge change from how I used to peruse HN, which was checking the comments first, then the article if it looked interesting.

I haven't written on technical topics in a bit, but my goal is to write for the remaining community of humans who largely reject AI and still find value in actually thinking about things.

It does not matter how small this community is because, at least for me, it is the only engineering community that actually matters going forward.

Some responses (Simon Wilison, antirez, Gergely Orosz, Sean Goedecke...) here: https://writethatblog.substack.com/t/tech-blogger-insights?s...

if you do it for yourself I think it could be fun - getting out some thoughts out of your head onto the virtual paper

if you're doing it for engagement and internet likes - hard to tell; I think it's really difficult to grab ppl attention nowadays so either you're gonna create 'controversial' pieces ("Software is solved", "Software is not solved" etc.) to lure some specific crowd or you're gonna be disappointed xd

(I do still write from time to time, all the blogs of my past coworkers I subscribed via rss feeds are dead)

I read a lot of blogs in 2026. I often click the source links that LLMs provide so I can get more context, and to see what else the author might be writing about.

IMO the value is in the thinking. Other people reading my non-professional writing sometimes the goal but most of the time it's a bonus.

Much of the value of writing one goes to the writer!

People are still reading. At least I am :)

I do! Usually I discover new blogs via Substack and read them via email client

OP here.

This is something I see a lot too, and I almost covered it in the post. I think it goes hand in hand with excessive formality where people think that if you're writing a blog post about something, you have to be an authority on the topic, but that's not true.

It's valuable and useful to write about things when you're still a beginner as long as you present yourself as a beginner. Julia Evans does this extremely well. My favorite example is "Some notes on using nix,"[0] which got me to start using Nix when I'd seen lots of other posts from more experienced Nix users that were too in the weeds for me to understand. But the way Julia approaches it is that she's learned a little bit more than someone who's never touched it, so you can read her progress and get a slight head start from where you would have started without her notes.

[0] https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/02/28/some-notes-on-using-nix/

How would you define the limit above which it's appropriate to share your findings on a given topic on your blog?

One minor thing about stale information- please record the original posted date. Far too many blogs seem to omit this crucial information.

I actually don’t like when technical blogging/writing is too casual, that’s distracting to me, the author isn’t my pal. It shouldn’t be excessively formal (as you’ve titled it) either, but neutral and matter-of-fact. For example, I enjoy Dijkstra’s writing style.

Friday will be the 20th anniversary of my first blog post, and I will continue to write sequels to my previous blog posts, and you can't stop me! ;-)

I think the biggest anti-pattern is not writing for who you are targeting, your intended audience.

I think your anti-patterns apply very well to the stereotypical SWE or HN reader, and if that is who you are targeting, you should absolutely follow these. But the biggest anti-pattern of all is following these anti-patterns while hoping to appeal to the untypical SWE or HN reader.

Nice to see some Butterick fonts employed on a blog. ;) Mine’s the same, but I went with Valkyrie and Hermes Maia.

Steve Kalabnik gave me similar feedback a year ago,[0] and I'm curious about your reading style because that feels so alien to me.

If you click on a blog post, and the writing is poor or seems LLM-generated, you keep reading? Or do you mean that you're willing to forgive more superficial things like meandering or excessive formality if the post has other redeeming qualities?

As an example, I clicked a post a few weeks ago about orchestrating Claude Code sessions[1], as that's a topic I'm interested in, but I found the writing so poor that I felt like the post was either LLM-generated or written for someone who had different needs than I did. Would you read a post like that to completion if the topic interests you?

[0] https://lobste.rs/s/youq7y/how_write_blog_posts_developers_r...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49772806

Honest question: if you truly only write for yourself, why submit the posts to HN and prominently display social sharing shortcuts at the top of each post?

I can understand the position that you do care about other people reading your post, but you weigh your own enjoyment of your posts more heavily than anything else, but I'm skeptical of the claim that you don't care who reads your posts.

Well, I have only just now skimmed your blog, but you already gave me a smirk.

  If you spot any, please write to complaints @ my domain. (And if you want to say nice things, write to compliments @ my domain :).

It's because your blog is good. Not all blogs need to be primers targeted at idiot level leeches who abhor thinking for themselves and cry when confronted with facts like "the author is a different human than me".

Well, you saved me writing a similar comment, and I like your blog too. (BTW I completely agree with your musings on what we might do with all this hardware, post-bubble. I actually started and... not quite abandoned a "sci-fi-ish short fiction" series on my own blog trying to think through those applications in my own industry.)

In my own writing it's like, I'm mostly trying to put something out in the world that I, and sometimes my friends, enjoy. The rambling is not exactly the point, but not exactly not the point either. If other like-minded people find it, great. Once somebody tipped me a thousandth of a Bitcoin or so, and that was fun too.

Wait, do you intend to implement each anti pattern into a single article? Or do you intend to write an article with none of these anti patterns?