Why write?
bastian.rieck.me
Why write?
1–10 of 39 posts
Re: Why write?
#2Illusion of explanatory depth.
Until you write (or otherwise explain), you really don’t know whether you even know what you think you do. We humans tend to over-estimate how well we understand something. We mentally paper over holes in our knowledge and handwave away pesky little details, until we try to explain the thing. Then you realize ”Wait, those two ideas aren’t connecting …”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_explanatory_depth
The other big reason, for me, is that without writing it soon feels like my head is exploding. So many ideas racing around it feels like I can’t think straight.
Re: Why write?
#3I recently started writing reviews of each book I read. I found it helps me retain the contents of the book and often people give positive feedback about what they learned from my review.
Re: Why write?
#4I like how this applies to commit messages and patchset cover letters as well. You write the whys and wherefores to both explain to others what's going on, as well as to make sure you understand yourself. For sure that increases your audience, nobody cared about your fix before! And you need to narrate all this -- a patch that fixes an issue should read a little bit like a whodunnit. What the issue is, how to trigger it, what the impact is, how the patch fixes it.
Re: Why write?
#5Illusion of explanatory depth. Until you write (or otherwise explain), you really don’t know whether you even know what you think you do. We humans tend to over-estimate how well we understand something. We mentally paper over holes in our knowledge and handwave away pesky little details, until we try to explain the thing. Then you realize ”Wait, those two ideas aren’t connecting …” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illu…
If I want to study something seriously, I formulate questions about what I am learning and commit them to Anki cards for review. It's anecdotal, but since I have been doing that, I am more careful of the content of what I study (I ask to myself: Did I understand that right? What does this part mean exactly? Isn't there a contradiction there? Let's see...).
Re: Why write?
#6I recently started writing reviews of each book I read. I found it helps me retain the contents of the book and often people give positive feedback about what they learned from my review.
Is there any review(er) in particular you used as inspiration here? Curious if you treat this more as personal notes, or a public-facing review?
Re: Why write?
#7Good advice. Implicit here is that you really need _something motivating_ to write/think about in order to follow this advice.
That's probably obvious, but perhaps relevant for someone who comes at this with an ambiguous desire to "write well" but without clarity on "about what."
Maybe a trivial point, but that's certainly the starting point of any writer's journey: a topic?
Re: Why write?
#8[deleted]
Re: Why write?
#9Good advice. Implicit here is that you really need _something motivating_ to write/think about in order to follow this advice. That's probably obvious, but perhaps relevant for someone who comes at this with an ambiguous desire to "write well" but without clarity on "about what." Maybe a trivial point, but that's certainly the starting point of any writer's journey: a topic?
An interesting topic or amalgamation point are weekly notes: summarize your week. Most of us on HN work with interesting problems and try to solve hard problems.
Write about the stuff you learned in this week or what you worked on.
It can be brief and it should e fun. Not homework.
Re: Why write?
#10I recently started writing reviews of each book I read. I found it helps me retain the contents of the book and often people give positive feedback about what they learned from my review.
Is there any review(er) in particular you used as inspiration here? Curious if you treat this more as personal notes, or a public-facing review?
I do the same, since the Start of the year. I write personal notes and if a book really gets to me I will write a public review