211–220 of 385 posts
Is anyone else seeing the irony of the poor writing in this article?
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Yup. Anti-signal-signals are a thing. "I don't want or need to care how hard it is for you to understand me, so I'm not going to give any thought or effort to making it easier for you" is certainly a kind of signal.
The signal I get from that is arrogance, then. Also, in an industry where “fake it till you make it” is the rallying cry, one shouldn’t appear dumb, lest one actually becomes dumb (at least in the eyes of their colleagues/superiors/reports/clients).
I'm not sure there is validity to either appearing smarter than you are or dumber on a regular basis though, particularly with people you work with. Integrity is a much more important attribute to me in coworkers and employees than either feigned competence or feigned humility. Genuine competence or genuine humility are different matters though of course.
Amazon is obsessive about this stuff. I'm surprised the article never mentions it. There are internal classes offered on writing better documents (and it's a great class). There's videos, guides, documents, everything. Writing well at Amazon is key to a successful career here. Got a project idea? Write a very good 1-pager explaining it and you've got a much higher chance of it actually happening. Want to share a desi…
The participants had not read the agenda, docs and done their actions before the meeting?
Asking everyone to please do these actions before the meeting is a good intention. Everyone wants to, but you know things happen and well I skimmed it but I didn't really have time and now I'm going to ask questions that page 2 answers clearly because I didn't read it. Everyone's time is wasted.
Forcing everyone to spend 15 minutes right now is a mechanism. It's much more effective.
Writing well is an undervalued skill in life, not just in engineering. When you work on a team of peers with similar skills in your field, whether that field is engineering or something else, being able to write well and communicate well become strong differentiators. FWIW, I'm pretty sure that writing (reasonably) well online is what got me a job in venture capital after ten years as an engineer. David Perell (host…
This is one of her books I would recommend: https://www.amazon.com/Was-Best-Sentences-Worst-Crafting/dp/...
I agree with the author that writing is one of the most undervalued skills for SWEs, but for a completely different reason - it forces you to reason things through properly, even if nobody else will ever read what you write. Writing a couple of pages of design docs or an Amazon-style 6 pager or whatever might take a few days of work, but can save weeks or more of wasted implementation time when you realise your syste…
I'm currently trying to get some folks on the same page regarding the most basic of things in a design document, and the passive resistance is just astonishing to me. Just adding the following text seems to upset some people: The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.…
You can pull up ASCE standards, the IBC OR CBC, Caltrans Highway Design Manual or Specs, Greenbook, Any city design manual, etc. etc. They’ll get the idea.
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I used to think like that (being the kid that wrote well in school). But now I'm not so sure anymore... Been humbled too many times by people much, much smarter than me that wrote in smsesque. Have read too many apparently well-written texts that are nothing but bullshit written by ignorants.
> Been humbled too many times by people much, much smarter than me that wrote in smsesque. Have read too many apparently well-written texts that are nothing but bullshit written by ignorants. I cannot imagine why you found them humbling. Ignorance or lack of skill are forgivable, but poor writing by someone who could do better but just doesn't care about their output or their audience is just lazy. If someone who cou…
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I've taken the class within Amazon. Honestly there isn't anything that you couldn't get by simply reading and applying the advice from "The Elements of Style" by Strunk and White[1] and "On Writing Well" by Zinsser [2]. The primary philosophy is that if you can't write well, then you haven't thought it through. The act of writing is an act of reasoning. 0. Practice in a strong feedback loop. This applies for anything…
> 5. Write in active voice. Look up the "by Zombies" trick. This is something I struggle with so I took your advice and found this: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/a-scary-easy-way-to-help-you-... Thanks!
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I've taken the class within Amazon. Honestly there isn't anything that you couldn't get by simply reading and applying the advice from "The Elements of Style" by Strunk and White[1] and "On Writing Well" by Zinsser [2]. The primary philosophy is that if you can't write well, then you haven't thought it through. The act of writing is an act of reasoning. 0. Practice in a strong feedback loop. This applies for anything…
I found "Style: Toward Clarity and Grace" [1] by Joseph M. Williams to be more informative than both of these recommendations, but YMMV. There is a newer version, but I haven't read it. [1]: https://smile.amazon.com/Style-Clarity-Chicago-Writing-Publi...
Did anyone else find this article to consist of ironically poor writing? The blog post contains of a lot of fragments, run-on-sentences, unnecessary pauses, mixed tenses, dangling clauses, use of the passive voices, and no Oxford comma!
I'm surprised this is so far down. I'm assuming most people commenting didn't actually read it and are just agreeing with the sentiment. Perhaps the author is not a native language speaker? That being said, I'm not sure why you'd write an article about the importance of writing if your writing is... below average at best.