Thanks so much! Applied Divinity Studies deserves a good deal of the credit for the style though, they really pushed me to make the tone more engaging/bold, and even gave me suggested rewrites in some places. I have gotten the subheading suggestion a couple of times now on different pieces, so you’re right that I should look into doing that more going forward.
Yeah, I likewise appreciated this post and think this sort of pushback on common but under-justified or oversimplified views seems a useful service to provide.
I’d recommend not just subheadings but also a summary / key takeaways section, ideally in the style used in Open Phil and Rethink Priorities posts and described in the post Reasoning Transparency.
This is a suggestion I very often make (i.e., it’s not like a weird rare issue with just this post). One reason I make it here is that I can imagine wanting to point people to this post in future but not really wanting to say “you should definitely spend 23 minutes reading the whole thing” and instead wanting them to be able to see the key conclusions and reasoning in condensed form right away and then make their own choices. See also Honesty about reading, in particular this passage:
And complementarily, authors should try to make life easy for readers who do not want to carefully read every word of their piece (at least, assuming it is more than a couple thousand words or so).
They should have easy-to-find sections of their piece that summarize and/or outline their arguments, with clear directions for which parts of the piece will give more detail on each point.
They shouldn’t force or expect readers to wade through all their prose to find a TL;DR on what they are arguing, what their main evidence is, why it matters, and what their responses to key objections are.
When someone says “You have to read this piece, it really shows that ___ ,” and I find myself unable to see where and how the piece shows ___ without embarking on a 10,000-word journey, I close the tab and forget about the argument, and this seems like the right thing to do.
(I collect other potentially useful thoughts on writing here. Though to be clear, I mostly found the writing in this post good already, and the only key thing I felt was missing was a summary section.)
Thanks so much! Applied Divinity Studies deserves a good deal of the credit for the style though, they really pushed me to make the tone more engaging/bold, and even gave me suggested rewrites in some places. I have gotten the subheading suggestion a couple of times now on different pieces, so you’re right that I should look into doing that more going forward.
Yeah, I likewise appreciated this post and think this sort of pushback on common but under-justified or oversimplified views seems a useful service to provide.
I’d recommend not just subheadings but also a summary / key takeaways section, ideally in the style used in Open Phil and Rethink Priorities posts and described in the post Reasoning Transparency.
This is a suggestion I very often make (i.e., it’s not like a weird rare issue with just this post). One reason I make it here is that I can imagine wanting to point people to this post in future but not really wanting to say “you should definitely spend 23 minutes reading the whole thing” and instead wanting them to be able to see the key conclusions and reasoning in condensed form right away and then make their own choices. See also Honesty about reading, in particular this passage:
(I collect other potentially useful thoughts on writing here. Though to be clear, I mostly found the writing in this post good already, and the only key thing I felt was missing was a summary section.)