”Writing Good”, there, I fixed it for you.
Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
351–360 of 385 posts
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#352I think writing well is a skill that is in very short supply all around, even in writing-focused areas like journalism. A major culprit in this, in my opinion, is how writing is taught in college. It's very common for students to be tasked with writing an essay with a minimum word count. This has been training people into the habit of being unnecessarily wordy and obtuse. What they should do, is give students a highe…
You overestimate people's ability and enjoyment in reading concise writing that has each word measured carefully.
In order to pass an exam in university, I had to deliberately repeat myself in a few subtle ways, only to be commended how I managed to get my points across very concisely.
I find that writing well is somewhere in the middle: people are used to skip-reading, so being very concise is counter-productive: unless you want to repeatedly point them to actual bits of text that answer their question but which they probably went over as only fill-text.
So, I prefer to state my position concisely at the front, benefitting people like me who prefer it that way, and then expand it with examples and more elaborate arguments for those that need more.
Like this post: the whole point is in the first sentence. The rest is just for the majority who'd basically not even read it, let alone bother to understand it.
(As a consequence, I often miss the happy middle and become too elaborate: it's a struggle :))
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#353Ugh, I don't understand why people keep recommend the Pinker book about writing well. Pinker has the most formal god awful style I could imagine. There are so many better writers to learn from. Don't fall for mimetics guys.
Can you be more specific? I started reading it and I'm actually enjoying reading about writing.
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#354Writing well can have several meanings. I've found that hilarious bug tickets are much better received and treated than dry ones. Maybe because they get many eyeballs (of the sort that makes all bug shallow). Here is one of the first ticket I wrote in my still current company: Then God appeared to wazoox and told him: "You will not spread your software on the face of the world without properly testing the new feature…
Writing well can have several meanings in literature, but in professional environments I'd argue it has one meaning: Writing well is writing something clear, concise, to the point. I worked with an engineer who wrote as you describe above ("hilariously") and it became incredibly tiring having to pick out the meaning of each correspondence. They took more time to read, and often important details were overlooked becau…
It depends upon the subject. General bug reports must be clear and to the point. However, at times you need to have some impact.
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#355I 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…
“Writing is nature's way of telling us how lousy our thinking is.” ― Leslie Lamport
A previous HN discussion on the subject from a decade ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=993253
The link has changed: http://www.petermichaud.com/essays/the-secret-about-writing-...
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#356I completely agree. In fact I created https://www.dailywritingtips.com/ (more than 10 years ago) for this exact reason.
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#357I sometimes think that programmers come in two types: mathematically inclined or linguistically inclined. Think sorting vs parsing.
I only realized this after testing out of and skipping all English and writing requirements easily, but having to retake several mathematics courses during my time in engineering school.
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#358I totally disagree with this claim, because, it is discriminating, narrow-minded, shortsighted and subjective.
Writing is only a way to convey information, there a many other ways to do it, and there surely will be other ways.
The current system favors people who know how to write in English, but it doesn't mean it's fair nor right.
A language that may work for you may not work for others, therefore, "well" is not objective.
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#359Did 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!
Yes, the article was mediocre writing at best. The author made his point clear, so he achieved the core goal of technical writing, but the writing itself was clumsy and distracted from his message.
Re: Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've found just declining these no-info meetings to be an effective way to combat the time loss. It's most constructive to send an email alongside saying something like "please share an agenda or materials for this", but that can vary based on context too. And you can even decline after that happens: "Thanks for the details. I'm sorry, but I cannot take the time away from X right now to attend this. Next week may be…
You say that, and it sounds like it ought to work, and yet… I had to do that to a co-worker, and all I got back was "Product Foo". Okay, but what about Product Foo? Blood from a stone, every damn time, and it wears me down.
Well, that kind of reply is just rude, and personally I'd probably ignore it and leave the meeting declined. If it comes up later, "Your reply about the meeting? No, I don't think...oh, I did see it, right. I assumed there was more info coming; I'm totally focussed on $X right now, you know."