2024-03-09 Who am I talking to?

I've recently started to change the way I write. I wonder how you feel about it: I find myself changing many sentences where I address you, the reader, to sentences where I say what I do. Here's something I just wrote on another page:

on another page

Old style

And if you don’t like it tomorrow, edit it. Revise it. Or write a new page saying how you learned something, or regret something, or add something.

New style

And if I don’t like it tomorrow, I edit it. I revise it. Or I write a new page saying how I learned something, or regret something, or I add something.

It's weird. I'm a bit self-conscious about the old style. It reads like an all-knowing voice ordering you around. How do you feel about it, as a reader? But then again, what do you think about the new style? When I start writing me, my and mine too often, I'm starting to feel like a pompous fool talking about myself all the time.

It's weird. I kind of like the idea of addressing you directly. Here I am, talking to you. Here's what I would do. Here's what I think you should do. Since I can't hear what you're thinking, I just keep talking. There's no inhalation, no sigh and no uh to stop me.

Maybe the problem is that at work, where I currently write documentation for new programmers in our teams, a coworker once said that I shouldn't address the reader all the time, or worse, talk about the things "we" would be doing together, as we work through the examples. It felt so natural! And now I often avoid the "you" but I still use the friendly imperative. Do this, do that, watch out, follow the link for more. And I rewrite sentences to be impersonal like fate: Sometimes the problem is this or that. It's never the problem we have or the problem you have, or the problem I once had.

That sort of thinking and rewriting is creeping into the blog, in any case. And I don't know how I feel about it.

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