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Comment by rewrew | Hacker News Reader

Writing is a craft, and it's a freaking hard one that takes combining a lot of skills plus a lot of discipline and hard work. If you don't have the patience to sit through something as simple as as a semester-long grammar class at your local community college as one aspect of learning the fundamentals you need to succeed, then most likely writing isn't the career path for you.

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Very true. But from another perspective: even someone with the patience to sit through a grammar course will only learn about the colon in theory.

This tool allows a player to see a colon being used, wonder why, learn why (explanatory videos coming soon), and then use the colon in practice.

Learning by doing is much more effective than learning theory, in my opinion.

Hm, dunno. I'd say writing is about having something to say. Especially something other people want or (more importantly) need to read. I don't think that Charles Bukowski was particularly disciplined or educated for example.

He was extremely disciplined - he made himself write every day after his grueling day job, for years (decades?), until he finally started getting some traction.

Everyone has something to say. The achievement of writers is being able to suitably express their thoughts to their audience.

Regarding Bukowski, you should check out his Wikipedia page. I'll snip some highlights, and draw some conclusions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bukowski

> poet, novelist, and short story writer

> Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over 60 books

You don't write thousands of poems without understanding language. He may not have had a complete collegiate education, but you can be sure he ended up studying language on his own.

Reading a lot is probably more useful than taking a class on grammar (for one thing, grammar is pretty easy to fix without altering a work).

Right. Plus, grammar is only one component of concise writing. Many of the original writing samples in the game are grammatically correct but still terribly lousy.

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