I wonder if you have any self-awareness about the toxicity of making a presumptuous and insulting comment about me, someone you don't know, based only on an article I wrote about toxicity... Or maybe you are just that uncaring about the impact you may have on someone's day? I can take valid criticism and have read the critique on here with genuine interest. However, I don't believe this comment about 'the writer' is necessary. I don't see anywhere I've talked about our "incredible journey" on the post either? This is a little baffling. I thank you for your view and engagement nonetheless.

I think it's probably not a good idea to read comments about your writing on the internet. They aren't sending them 'to you' - you've sought out this discussion - so it's on you if you choose to read people's opinions.

If you want constructive advice: try to write in the same way that you would talk. Shallowly, that means read your writing out loud – what Flaubert called his 'gueulade' – or, even better, vice versa: write down your spoken thoughts. More deeply it means not saying anything that you wouldn't say in real life. Get to the point, ditch the fluff, treat it like a (garrulous, one-sided) phone call. Have your point constantly at the front of your mind, and only say what's absolutely necessary to explain or justify it. It will improve your writing immensely.

Oh, and read Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language': https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli.... If pressed for time, then particularly the last third or so. His advice is the best you can ever hear as a writer. Reflect on your good fortune: by writing this, you've now identified what makes good writing.

Hey, thanks for your comment. I took a walk in the sunshine to decompress a bit and before I go I just wanted to pop back on to explain a couple of things. I didn't seek this out. I don't really go looking for such discussions because I'm a bit too time-starved, but someone let me know they shared my article on here because they liked it so I checked it out. Because I don't go looking for this, this hasn't really happened before (as far as I know) and it's a bit jarring to see people make assumptions about my intelligence for conforming to a style guide for accessibility reasons and practicing what the product preaches. I want to also mention that whilst I'm sure you're trying to be helpful and not condescending, I have read Flaubert and I've read Orwell, his fiction and his work on the English Language. I have a Masters Degree in English so I've read quite a lot lol, I sound like a dickhead saying that. I only say that to contextualise that I like a lot of 18th and 19th-century Lit which has a lot of long, winding sentences; my own writing took on that character and I struggled for a long time to adapt my writing style. So if it's coming across disjointed then that's something I need to take on board because I'm writing in a style that isn't mine. Ultimately it is compliance - someone called it aggressive compliance, I can't really comment on that. Readability compliance is actually really important when it comes to inclusivity and vital things like medical literacy, which is just one of the reasons people use our product. With this being said, its effect on writing style is obviously something I need to feed back for product development so we can continue making a better, more nuanced tool. We've already made a lot of progress from readability calculators from the past and want to keep improving this technology. I'm not shy about criticism, I haven't even been shy about my username. But yeah, I don't even go here, so I don't know what the critique environment is like. Thank you for taking the time to write this, I do appreciate you're coming from a good place here.

> someone let me know they shared my article on here because they liked it so I checked it out.

> I didn’t seek this out.

Oh, come on.

> Ultimately it is compliance - someone called it aggressive compliance, I can't really comment on that.

Hmm, I suppose either the house style mandates what I would consider extremely poor writing (I won’t belabour the reasons), or the house style mandates some broadly formal style and the challenge is to write well within it. If the former, I suppose you should take my comments as applying to the house style and not your own writing ability; if the latter, I’d more or less reiterate what I said, and I doubt any non-insane style guide would, say, forbid you to use plain Anglo-Saxon words, vary your sentence length, write grammatically, etc.

In either case I admit I find it very bewildering to reconcile your well written comment with the solecisms and illiteracies that post was littered with*, or to make sense of your coming here to read and grow upset at criticism of a post which – given your now-evident possession of a brain stem – you must surely have known was atrociously written.

Thanks for your civil response, and for your taking my comment in the same spirit. It wasn't meant as a personal attack, no. It was meant to be an impersonal attack: all I knew of you was that piece of writing, and that was all I wanted to consider. Hopefully** my comment contributes to better instructing whoever and/or whatever was or were responsible for that lobotomised dross!

* With which that post… **Yeah, yeah, ok

I think one of the contributors to toxic positivity is to try to head off subthreads like this.

I spend more time than I’d like adding in positive language around everything because people overreact to anything not super positive. So to avoid people misinterpreting my comments, Ill usually add in lots of “a+,” blue ribbon, superpowers, etc blargh.

I appreciate you writing your article and participating in this thread but think we’re part of the problem.

If people are better able to accept criticism, then we’ll get more reality. Until then, I’m more likely to comment positively or not comment at all on the very likely chance that the author jumps into a thread and spazzes out on me.

I think you were trying to empathize, but I don’t think a master’s in English is necessarily useful for the topics brought up in this thread. Without more context (school, projects, interests, performance) I don’t think there’s any correlation between masters in English and ability to read and write well.

Eh, I think a Master's in English is good (a fortiori) proof that they know how to string a sentence together. I am still absolutely mystified at how they wrote that flatulent nonsense. And I mean truly, genuinely mystified, not 'mystified' as in 'clearly suspecting X or Y but not wanting to say'. It's now 100% beyond doubt, in my mind, that they are capable of writing far better than that, indeed very well by any standard, even within some given register[0]. I also don't at all buy their explanation of 'malicious compliance', considering their hurt, piqued responses to the criticism in this thread. Every possibility here makes very little sense to me.

[0] Not in a Dr Jekyll scenario, not even if in some Parfit-esque farce their brain were indexterously bisected with cheese wire and not either half but the intervenient dribble of corpus callosum attained sentience would said brain-dribble even in its admitted abjection be left with the deficit in neuronal voltage absolutely required to bring that tripe into existence, no more than I could fake a Pollock, or Infinite Jest, or Finnegans Wake.

>I don't see anywhere I've talked about our "incredible journey" on the post either? This is a little baffling.

I'll step in to defend the OP because I know where they are coming from: your article is a drop in an ocean of a certain genre of article that HN has encountered over the years and we've devised certain aphorisms to describe them, and by association, describe the authors.

One of those is that the author is complaining, praising, making a statement about something that shows they are severely out of touch with reality. Usually it's some kind of a self-congratulatory or self-aggrandizing thing that completely glosses over red flags - like say somebody building a very eco-unsustainable house in British Columbia's mountain ranges while fawning over how eco-friendly they are in the details, missing the larger scale of problems they are (intentionally?) ignoring. Being flush with tech money does funny things to people.

Often times, however, we've seen the opposite, "Our Great Journey", which has been parodied over the years elsewhere, not just HN. It describes a PR puff piece style that glosses over the fact that a company has failed/not been profitable in it's mission and is being sold off to another company. The founders, of course, would never dare say it in those direct terms, and so the PR speak is written, copied, and eventually parodied.

And eventually we arrive to what OP is commenting on, where the language used to describe rather mediocre and boring jobs is flourished with fanciful titles/words (like "empathy superpowers"). It begs to be mocked because it's such an extravagant literal style that, at this point, we can't take seriously anymore. We've seen too much of this bullshit and it cannot be unseen. We've seen too many associations of this kind of phrasing with people who really are out of touch and whatever plights they have should at worst be ridiculed, at best be completely ignored.

Basically, it's all so tiresome.

As for your post, there's not enough meat on it. Using social media as a launchpad to talk about "toxic positivity" is fairly benign - you can find just about any stupid shit on Instagram to talk about and segue into whatever moral grandstanding you want to convey. You can find both for- and against- examples. Hell, you don't even need to give examples, you can just say such-and-such is happening, and people will nod and go with it, because who are they to know better, right?

I suspect, as with other writing I've seen before, that (a) they have no real thoughts about this topic (indeed it strikes me as very difficult for anyone to form a genuine thought about), and (b) therefore they are mechanically churning out 'content' (euch), emulating whatever examples they have seen. That's what explains so many in the comments feeling that it was produced by GPT-3.

And, let's be honest, this is only an unusually pure rendition of that genre of writing: formulaic, saccharine but detectably hollow, devoid of substance, strung together with stale clichés, seemingly written to typify an attitude (one of cultish overfriendliness without boundaries) more than what we would traditionally recognise as a 'point'.

The discomfiting feeling you get when reading it is the feeling that the author doesn't care about any of this. And that you don't blame her. It's an egg laid by a caged hen, full of sad hormones and stress. You can feel it in the way that there's nothing there above the phrasal or (at most) sentential level: no overarching purpose, every sentence out for itself with no overarching strategy from above, like an Elizabethan commonplace book full of random helpful platitudes.

It's why I recommended Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language'. I have never read bad writing, truly bad writing, produced by someone speaking sincerely and plainly of a subject they care about, saying something about it which they think ought to be said.

I would like to say a second thank you for your response here. The way you've expressed this gives me food for thought on how I spread my time and energy, and how it manifests in terms of quality. I'm leaving this behind me tomorrow and taking what I have found useful so I've actually screen-shotted this comment in particular to take away with me. The way you've worded the issue is thoughtful and I'm not able to respond to it point by point here but I appreciate it.

Ah, thank you - I had this thread open in a tab all day, and I'm a compulsive procrastinator (not just some amateur crastinator), hence the intermittent participation! It reads as quite pompous now that I read it back, but hey, I think that of all my comments, so I'm very happy if it was any use to you. Wishing you all the best, and that you find an opportunity to put your skills to better, worthier use. Here's to artists, chefs, and saints :)

Hey, thanks for this!