Best Writing Advice for Engineers I've Ever Seen.

If it were less deliberately controversial it would be more digestible. As is, some of his points seems inconsistent, but that may be due to presentation.

The other important thing needed is:

Make your message concrete and specific.

It is no use reading a first sentence that says something like: "We created a novel abstraction to improve software development.". Yes, it is concise, but it says nothing. "We used wavelet analysis to find and factor-out the most modified aspects of our code." -- that I can see I want to know more about.

The passive voice should be avoided.

Agreed. I've got a journalism background (though I'm now a web developer) and it has helped me tremendously.

The main thing is this: think and write carefully. I get emails from business people that are long, rambling, and at the end, I can't even tell what they mean or want. And the subject line isn't helpful if I need to find it later.

I write emails with the assumption that you've got 5 seconds to read it. Subjects like "Are we still meeting at 2PM today?" so you might not even need the body, which is short and to the point.

Also, if I have three unrelated questions for someone, I write three short emails. I want them to be able to answer two and flag one for later if necessary, without drudging up the other issues that were already solved.

The other great lesson from journalism is "people have short attention spans." The inverted pyramid is for hard news stories, but even fluff pieces try to start with really catchy first sentences and be clear throughout. If you lose people's attention too often, you lose your customers.

Many academics and businesspeople should learn from this - they often seem more concerned with sounding smart than really conveying information. Great ideas are no good if nobody hears about them. And in my experience, great minds are generally good at explaining their ideas clearly.

I pasted it to Jottit because a) I don't have a blog that's relevant to the topic, b) the original comment is hard to link to accurately due to sloppy coding on ET, and c) I wanted to try Jottit after learning about it. I considered adding an explanatory paragraph, but I felt it could be crude and self-promotional (if someone says something, they should have their name against it) as the quote stands alone pretty well.

The issues you raise regarding link sharing are valid, and exist, but in this case it's really just a cut and paste job (and if it were not interesting, I doubt it'd get 100 upvotes here). I could have put it on Gist, Pastie, or 101 other sites. The quote is the whole bit. No analysis necessary.

Nonetheless, this would have worked better as a brief personal blog post. If I get back into personal blogging, I'd certainly tackle it that way instead.