61–70 of 110 posts
Stackoverflow worked wonders for me. Of course at first I sounded like Tarzan, but after some time I started to get comments like this: "+1 for sense of humor and for the fact the post is written in normal English, not geek English".
Take this one step further: For everything you write, imagine the utmost authority on that topic reading your post. A blunt example: A rant about Python syntax. Imagine Guido van Rossum reading that during his coffee break.
Do not post if you can not add anything to the discussion. Assume your debater is smarter than you and knows more on the subject. This is still HackerNews. Ask someone if they have won the Putnam prize, and you may be unpleasantly surprised. [1]
Read and practice: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
Use your spell-checker. Write shorter sentences to avoid grammatical errors. Nobody is too smart for short, simple sentences.
Not in an insulting way of course - just in an improving way. And on that note, I'd be more than happy to give you feedback on your posts & comments here if it would be helpful and not offensive. In public or in private. Just let me know!
"4. If you don't have functional English, learn it.
As an American and native English-speaker myself, I have previously been reluctant to suggest this, lest it be taken as a sort of cultural imperialism. But several native speakers of other languages have urged me to point out that English is the working language of the hacker culture and the Internet, and that you will need to know it to function in the hacker community.
Back around 1991 I learned that many hackers who have English as a second language use it in technical discussions even when they share a birth tongue; it was reported to me at the time that English has a richer technical vocabulary than any other language and is therefore simply a better tool for the job. For similar reasons, translations of technical books written in English are often unsatisfactory (when they get done at all).
Linus Torvalds, a Finn, comments his code in English (it apparently never occurred to him to do otherwise). His fluency in English has been an important factor in his ability to recruit a worldwide community of developers for Linux. It's an example worth following.
Being a native English-speaker does not guarantee that you have language skills good enough to function as a hacker. If your writing is semi-literate, ungrammatical, and riddled with misspellings, many hackers (including myself) will tend to ignore you. While sloppy writing does not invariably mean sloppy thinking, we've generally found the correlation to be strong — and we have no use for sloppy thinkers. If you can't yet write competently, learn to."
There is a lot in common between good argumentative skills and good coding.
There is no better way to doom yourself to something than to say you're doomed to that fate. If you want to be a better speaker, practice. Some people pop out of the womb with great oratory ability. Most people have to learn it through hard work and practice and failure.
There's a fallacy here, and interestingly it's also at play on facebook. You know when you look through your feed on facebook, and every single day you see that at least one of your friends has done something amazing, commendable or just interesting? That makes you feel that you aren't doing anything with your life, and that all your friends seem to be living more interesting and happier lives. But stop and think for…
Also see http://alistapart.com/column/seeing-past-the-highlight-reel : "we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel".
People also tend to sound far better in writing, precisely because they have the opportunity to compose and edit; you don't necessarily see the volume of composition and editing that goes into the average post. Anecdotally, I'd suggest that it takes far longer to write a quality post than you'd guess. Short content can take all the longer to write, precisely because of its brevity. ("I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short." -- Blaise Pascal)
(I also like this image: http://open.bufferapp.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/0-VtB9_... )
And that's just on an individual level, comparing yourself to one specific other person. When you compare yourself to an entire community of people and their highlights, you run into exactly the issue mixmax noted: the most knowledgeable and confident people will post, and a subset of those will get upvoted.
Comparing yourself individually to the best of what a large community can offer is like asking why you're not an Olympic athlete.
If you want to build up your skills in writing specifically, consider focusing your writing on areas you already have expertise in, or on areas that you're actively learning about to provide an "experiences" type of writeup. And compare yourself primarily to your past self.
ESR noted this way back when [1]: "4. If you don't have functional English, learn it. As an American and native English-speaker myself, I have previously been reluctant to suggest this, lest it be taken as a sort of cultural imperialism. But several native speakers of other languages have urged me to point out that English is the working language of the hacker culture and the Internet, and that you will need to know…
That's true. When I read a CS book in Greek, it's hard to understand what the author wants at once. Words like module when talking about kernels for example, are not easy to translate.
Write.
A.
Lot.
In reply, I say bravo for trying to become a better writer. And if English is not your native language, don't become discouraged too soon if your progress seems slow at first. I've been very impressed by the English writing here of some people who plainly grew up speaking some other language in a non-English-speaking country. Keep practicing, and you will become better. For specific writing advice, I recommend the ne…
I really like this because you get to hear usually several different accents & voices that you can start to correlate with stereotypes - how does a young woman talk, how does a shy person talk, how does a businessman talk, how does a thug talk, etc.
