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Comment by Mc_Big_G | Hacker News Reader

aka "How to write a high school essay."

If this is how you were taught to write high school essays, you were lucky.

   I. Introduction
  II. Body
      A. Point 1
      B. Point 2
      C. Point 3
 III. Conclusion

-5 points for each deviation.

Don't forget, if ranked by order of importants, the body should be:

    Point 2
    Point 3
    Point 1

I was also taught that the introduction must consist of a sentence that brings the reader to the topic, followed by the topic itself, and then a short description of points 1, 2 and 3. Again, any deviation will be penalized to the full extent of the law.

    A. Point 1
       1. Topic Sentence
       2. Concrete Detail
       3. Commentary
       4. Concrete Detail
       5. Commentary
       6. Commentary
       7. Transition Sentence

That format was driven into our heads in high school. When I was a freshman in College, I was amazed that very few of my peers could write an essay - a skill I had thought to be pretty basic.

At the time, I wondered, "if they didn't learn how to write an essay in high school, what did they learn?" I never really found out.

Seems to be a technical version of "How To Write A Five-Paragraph Essay."

Thankfully, the ability to write well never loses favor.

In real life you have a lot of information about your audience. You can guess whether jargon and equations will help or hinder communication. You are probably not reduced to guessing, you can go and ask your audience. They may come to you. This is probably not the first time you have written for them, you probably have valuable knowledge from last time.

Today's audience is not your only audience. Although you have valuable knowledge it may be in a bit of a jumble, with considerations that apply differently to different audiences clearly labelled as to whether they worked but not so clearly labelled as to the particular audience that delivered its verdict.

This deficiency is likely because high school essay writing has no audience, which trains you to ignore the most important question about writing: who is this for?

Additionally, I tend to ignore writing advice from people who use incomplete sentences. That page was a travesty.

edit: I didn't know this was a comment before I posted this, but it does bring up issues with 'blogging in general.

I think the basic advice offered in the article is solid. It's not in the most aesthetically pleasing style, but what are you gonna do. I guess I just don't hate minor sentences as much as you do.

Yes, it's solid advice, but it is basic. If we're talking about "engineers", that probably means they have completed a college degree at some point. If an engineer completed a degree and didn't take a technical writing course that drilled these concepts into their heads, then I question the quality of such an engineer's education.

I think you underestimate the ability of some people to pass classes without learning anything. I met an engineering student who had somehow passed a tough, high-quality technical writing class and yet could not write a coherent sentence, let alone a useful paragraph. I suspect that he cheated his ass off in most of his classes.

You know, I feel no sympathy for such people. If the reason they don't know how to write "well-enough" is because they cheated their way through college, then they deserve whatever lack of career opportunities they find themselves in.

It's worth noting that the advice is just a comment left on an Edward Tufte thread (which, as a whole, is a lot more interesting): http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

this wasn't clear to me from the link provided.

edit: actually, this is an excellent demonstration of bad writing -- or rather 'blogging -- on behalf of whomever runs engineerwriting.jottit.com. The post is a straight copy out of another source, with a link to the source, with no explanation of what is going on, no discussion on the material, no value-add in general.

This is something that I struggle with in my link-sharing emails to my friends. After literally thousands of link-share emails, it starts to get hard to say something original beyond "I thought this was funny/interesting/etc", which eventually becomes practically worn into my keyboard. But then this is a good indicator to me that maybe the link isn't worth sharing. If I can't come up with something more interesting to say than "this is funny", then I don't need to be wasting my friends' time with it, because they have their own lists of pages that they peruse and they don't need me filling up their inbox with 25 new conversation threads in a single day.

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.

How about:

Make engineers write concise sentences by combining journalism with the technical report format. Paragraphs in a newspaper article are ordered by importance, so that at whatever point readers stop reading they know that the part they have read was more important than the part left unread.

I think the second paragraph is pretty good, especially given the emphasis on concise sentences.

So do you never use such structures in speech? They're a way of getting the point across clearly and succinctly. Just because they taught you it's "wrong" in school doesn't mean that it doesn't have value.

Recently, Copyblogger had a good article elaborating on just what you said: http://www.copyblogger.com/tips-for-better-writing/

I wasn't aware that this was a comment on another piece. Yes, I use less formal grammar in less formal situations. I even experiment in the minimalist form with haiku and other writing. Knowing now that it was a comment makes a little more sense. Without knowing that, it just seemed like lazy writing.

But why does a blog post have to be formal in the first place?

Because you deign to waste our time with it. Putting effort into your writing shows that you have respect for your readers.

Actually I find it quite different from high-school essays.

In the "5 paragraph essay" you have 3 ideas, in the middle, and you summarize them in the intro and re-summarize in the conclusion. This advocates the journalism focus of getting your big idea out early, and expanding if needed. Most high school essays wouldn't teach you much reading just the title + abstract (first paragraph).

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