As someone who explains complicated things to people in writing for a living, this is one of the best guides for business and technical communication I’ve ever seen.
How to write more clearly, think more clearly, and learn complex material [pdf]
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Re: How to write more clearly, think more clearly, and learn complex material [pdf]
#92Key takeaways: 1. One of the best ways to improve your writing is to learn how to cut out words that are not necessary 2. Stuffy writing is bad writing! It lowers the power of your brain and mine! 3. What words should you never use in writing? Words whose exact meanings you don’t know! Never use a word unless you know EXACTLY what it means 4. If your writing is nonsense, maybe your thoughts are nonsense too! 5. To ke…
Disagreed with 5, it's too prescriptive. Lots of great writers use progressive disclosure to keep people hooked
Being unselfish also helps with building great products. Reminds me of this article, treat your reader like a customer: https://www.productlessons.xyz/article/improve-business-writ...
Re: How to write more clearly, think more clearly, and learn complex material [pdf]
#93Something that's coming to mind while reading this is how much company communication these days happens almost exclusively on Slack, and how antithetical that format can be to writing and thinking clearly.
I've suggested creating a company forum at a few different places, but it's always received like a strange idea that nobody will actually engage with or give any thought to. Email, Slack, etc, none of them create a good long term record that outsiders and newcomers can consume. Some companies have a wiki, but I've never seen them used. Forums are good for long form communication, people can put in more effort knowing…
This idea was completely alien to me until I experienced it first hand. The F in FAANG puts emphasis on putting things like weekly/monthly status reports, incident investigation (even minor ones), and other useful information into 100-500 word posts. This has created a wealth of historical documentation about projects and problems that always helped me debug problems. What's more, it made discussing plans easier because participants had hours/days to think things through and shape them into paragraphs.
I've heard that Stripe and Amazon have writing coded into their cultures as well. I wish I knew more companies that did this because it's absolutely a different level of communication that helps ease so much friction (at a small price of reading/writing).
Re: How to write more clearly, think more clearly, and learn complex material [pdf]
#94Key takeaways: 1. One of the best ways to improve your writing is to learn how to cut out words that are not necessary 2. Stuffy writing is bad writing! It lowers the power of your brain and mine! 3. What words should you never use in writing? Words whose exact meanings you don’t know! Never use a word unless you know EXACTLY what it means 4. If your writing is nonsense, maybe your thoughts are nonsense too! 5. To ke…
Disagreed with 5, it's too prescriptive. Lots of great writers use progressive disclosure to keep people hooked Being unselfish also helps with building great products. Reminds me of this article, treat your reader like a customer: https://www.productlessons.xyz/article/improve-business-writ...
I agree. Sometimes a transition statement is better. Sometimes one must present evidence, then summarize. This is just my summary of the full 120-slide PowerPoint.
Re: How to write more clearly, think more clearly, and learn complex material [pdf]
#95"Never draw the reader’s eye
to anything
that is not
the main point."
I loved that phrase! I think it is important for designing UIs too.
Re: How to write more clearly, think more clearly, and learn complex material [pdf]
#96I dont care about writing but I want to learn new things quickly- how?
Re: How to write more clearly, think more clearly, and learn complex material [pdf]
#97One useful first step in becoming a better writer - in particular if your subject is complex - is to to delete your Twitter account and never look at another Twitter thread. Character limits kill creativity and complexity. The presentation does leave out one very necessary requirement for becoming a good-to-great writer: you have to do a lot of reading. If you're going to write about a complex scientific or technical…
Twitter is an extreme example, but in general, learning to cut concepts down to the bone and write in short succinct sentences is a super useful skill to make your writing more comprehensible. For example:
Twitter is an extreme example. In general, however, it is important to learn to cut concepts down to the bone. Writing in short succinct sentences is a super useful skill. It improves your writing and makes it more comprehensible.
Re: How to write more clearly, think more clearly, and learn complex material [pdf]
#98I think this is a great presentation. I've found that learning to write has largely a process of unlearning everything I was taught in secondary school. In school we were conditioned to excrete as much bullshit as we could in a fixed amount of time. Everything we learned--new vocabulary, literary techniques--we were told was for sounding more sophisticated, which we unknowingly interpreted as verbose. I even remember…
Another thing done at all levels of schooling is to ignore the needed process of revision. A paper is written and then graded, but if revision was a focus the student would learn a great lesson: great ideas and writing take re-writing
Re: How to write more clearly, think more clearly, and learn complex material [pdf]
#99Anyone know who is this RDG?
Re: How to write more clearly, think more clearly, and learn complex material [pdf]
#100One useful first step in becoming a better writer - in particular if your subject is complex - is to to delete your Twitter account and never look at another Twitter thread. Character limits kill creativity and complexity. The presentation does leave out one very necessary requirement for becoming a good-to-great writer: you have to do a lot of reading. If you're going to write about a complex scientific or technical…
> The presentation does leave out one very necessary requirement for becoming a good-to-great writer: you have to do a lot of reading.
I strongly agree. Based on my experience in my first profession, teaching school children throughout my 20s, I’d say that doing a lot of reading is more important than everything on these slides combined.