Be Positive In Your Writing

Or the story of how I fell into the trap of “don’t do X, do Y instead”

Today when I published my article “Don’t tell people to use VIM (because) You’re Using It Wrong” I realized something that I realize time and time again. It’s easy to fall into the terse condescending superior tone and write as if your audience is dumb.

It’s easy because that’s what often expected. People want to be challenged, they want to be abused nearly trolled by your writing just so that they can root themselves in their beliefs and opinions and let it all out. What better time is there to let it all out then when you want to overthrow the overlord (OP)?

From Reddit to HN, we want to be trolled. Or if not trolled, we want to be challenged. When TJ Holowaychuk wrote about leaving Node, dozens of articles popped up right away, discussions were started across the tech community. Hell, even my coworkers and I got into a whole discussion about it and people that never gave a Go a chance ended up getting into it just to see what the buzz was about.

So people want it. They want to be told, “You’re doing this wrong and here’s why” and “Stop using X”, they want to be told so that they can rebel so that they can post their IMO and their IANAL and start a discussion on the topic.

It’s so easy to fall into it that I rewrote my entire article before I posted it. It was called “How and why I use VIM: My personal story” and it somewhat touched upon the new fad, and the new trends but in a friendly funny way, not the way I transformed it to.

I’ve done it before too and was never proud of it so why did I fall into that trap again? I hope everyone else has better luck.