People hold beliefs of different levels of confidence. I have some opinions I’m very confident in and others that are merely vague hunches. My level of confidence in something is the signal I’m trying to convey, not merely the fact that it is my thought at all.
It can also be useful to communicate brief info about why I have a particular confidence level. “I had a friend who…” vs “I’ve seen several times…” vs “Several studies have found…”
> when I think back to taking writing classes in school
Yeah I think most of that stuff was bullshit. Or, being more charitable, they were trying to convey a general idea like “don’t overly hedge” with a coarse rule like “never use hedging language”.
I think most writing “rules” tend to be coarse approximations at what good writing really is. Another example is “give your essays a general structure, introduce your main point, etc.” => five paragraph essays.
I hedge a lot in HN comments. Uncharitably, because I’m thinking defensively about how people respond to my comments. Charitably, because it’s more accurate that way.
Long-form content suffers from hedging more that HN comments do. As a writer, you may think highly of your confidence level, and you may want to communicate the difference between a claim that you’re confident about and a claim that you are unsure about, but the right way to do that is to provide the information necessary for other people to come to the same conclusion. If that’s not possible, or it’s not germane, or you’re just busy doing something else, then you don’t do it, and that’s okay. It’s often just irrelevant for people to understand how much you believe something.
The tradeoff I see here is between clarity and precision. If you focus too much on precision, the clarity of whatever you’re trying to say suffers.
It can also be useful to communicate brief info about why I have a particular confidence level. “I had a friend who…” vs “I’ve seen several times…” vs “Several studies have found…”
> when I think back to taking writing classes in school
Yeah I think most of that stuff was bullshit. Or, being more charitable, they were trying to convey a general idea like “don’t overly hedge” with a coarse rule like “never use hedging language”.
I think most writing “rules” tend to be coarse approximations at what good writing really is. Another example is “give your essays a general structure, introduce your main point, etc.” => five paragraph essays.