How do you get to write so well in HN?

Thank you! I'd love you buy you a beer or coffee in return!

Advice to practice is good. Advice on HOW to practice may be useful, too.

Try summarising other people's texts - and don't just take each sentence separately and try to make it shorter, take all the ideas in the piece and experiment with reorganising them in your mind and then on the page to produce a more elegant and concise means of expressing them to your reader. Lots of the good HN writers you've noted see the short and compelling 'elevator pitch' that summarises months of work and aspiration as their greatest challenge. Politicians are always looking for the 10 word phrase that conveys the heart of their policy.

Read what you write back to yourself. Aloud. Good writing also tends to be 'performable' - no rambling subclauses to get lost in, no awkward word combinations that make the speaker (or listener, or reader) stumble and disengage. Be more Harrison Ford and less George Lucas (Han Solo said something like "You can write this stuff, George, but I can't say it")

And finally, do exactly what you've started here: Seek advice and feedback. This is a community that shares ideas, so dive in, but ask for comment on how you express them as well as their content. Grab a native speaker and check your idioms. Ask friends to point out the clunky sentences that lets down an otherwise good paragraph.

Good luck to you!

I would recommend not only reading, but also writing a lot of text. I find that writing text is not much different from programming: if you just try to improve a little it will not work. You have to make a conscious effort.

Also writing is an iterative process, at least when you are learning a foreign language. Write a paragraph, then stop and think: how can I express the same idea in a better way? Rewrite it until you cannot add or remove anything else. Then keep writing another paragraph. After several of them go back to the first ones and read them for yourself. They might not make sense anymore; so start again.

It's not simple and not everyone can make it. You have to aim for doing your best and stop any "it's good enough" thoughts that you might have. There will be a point when you don't need to rewrite it anymore; that's when you pick up a a new language (;

TL;DR:

1. Read 2. Write 3. Rewrite 4. GOTO 1

I'd suggest to look up a list of the "100 best English books" or something like that, and also to read a lot of the best engineering/development books, including those that are written about the developers themselves more than the details of their work.

I would say practice makes perfect. If becoming a better writer is important to you, try to build a regular practice where you write each day and build some sort of feedback loop into this process to help you improve the quality.

There are plenty of pedantic people spending their time on forums who will naturally correct you if you make an error in your writing.

Writing a blog entry once a week and asking a friend or two to review the draft might be another way.

You're not doomed to anything if you take on a mindset where you believe that you can and will improve.