How to Write Without Writing
codinghorror.com
codinghorror.com
For example (for a bit of self-promotion), this recent comment possibly could've been a better-written and better-edited blog post, with some images and examples, and a title like "implicit and explicit models in interactive fiction", or I dunno, something like that but catchier: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2177226. But writing something like that would probably sit on the TODO list for a long time; meanwhile I just banged out that comment in 20 minutes or so because it came up in discussion. The fact that it was "replying to a comment" rather than "writing a thing" somehow tricked it into not feeling like writing. Now if I ever want to write a blog post, I have a draft of the idea written out.
I think the fundamental point of the article is correct. Just write. Do it anywhere, and you'll get better. No finer than here at HN :p
Many people wonder what the point of participating on HN is. This is my primary reason for doing it here. Being able to write something that survives here is a valuable skill to keep in practice; being able to do it when it against the groupthink even moreso, which I get to practice sometimes.
(I write because I must, but I could find much easier places to do it than here. I do keep a blog but that's for different things.)
I've always hated writing, from my first english courses. I felt the way it was done, with an overemphasis on creative writing (which is of limited use in many real-world situations, beyond developing technique), and the focus on word count (write me a 3 pager, if it's less your grade goes down) was a detriment to clear, concise, well written and direct communication.
Writing in school should quickly progress past the creative stage after middle school, and focus on technical, nonfiction, and other explanatory methods through high school. It should be split off from literature courses, which would better be combined with philosophy and history.
Similarly, I hated typing classes. I learned to type by telnetting into MUDs and learning it on my own. This was much more fun and less of a grind than typing "cat cat cat dog cat cat" over and over. The downside? I can never use an ergonomic keyboard, as I hit the "b" key with my left index finger.
It seems to me that people get it drummed into them that length is proportional to importance. This is not true; the best writing conveys its point simply and elegantly.
"[Writing] is finished not when there's nothing left to add, but when there's nothing left to take away." (paraphrased)
I had her pick 3 points she wanted to make, do a little bit of online research on each point to develop a paragraph on two on each, and then add real introduction and conclusion paragraphs.
It's a simple formula that they teach in schools, but they don't reinforce when they give writing assignments. The assignment would have been clearer if the teacher had asked for 3-5 major influences on the civil rights movement. Sometimes you get what you ask for.
The nice thing was that, afterward, my daughter said that this way was a lot easier. BS'ing is hard work! One of the things I've noticed in both school and the workplace is that a lot of people expend more energy trying to avoid work then it would take just to do the work in the first place.
Criminals are a perfect example of this. I see a movie like "The Town" by Ben Affleck and I think to myself, "man, all that stress and hard work and almost certainty of death and/or federal prison goes into this, and most of the time they'll walk out with less than 6 figures when it's all divided up".
I think the problem is alot of people never learned how to think in small bits at a time. Our mind is cluttered like one of those hoarder/packrat types they exploit on reality TV. We're thinking about how complex the overall problem has to (or is going to) be, instead of just chunking it out into separate problem domains and tackling them one at at time. The myriad things we have in our head induces paralysis. Distractions like HN and reddit don't exactly help alleviate that, btw :D
For example: Programming a game that has a main character jumping around throwing ninja stars while avoiding spike pits, sword-wielding baddies, and evil wizards shooting fireballs sounds like a daunting task, but starting with "let's move the character thingy around the screen" might be less mind-meltingly hard. But, people just think about the end-goal and just shrug off how others can accomplish it as "magic".
Maybe that's why people choose to be employees rather than entrepreneurs: Complexity kills motivation. Entrepreneurs are just better equipped to tackle complexity one problem at a time.
I received a formal education in technical writing. In college, I probably submitted a peak of 40 thousand words to my professors in a single semester. But I wrote at least double that, in the form of things like notes, outlines, and stuff discarded as inadequate or unnecessary. That was the chief thing I learned: not to write less, but to discard more.
One of my favorite adages about writing is a good complement to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's quote. It's Sturgeon's Law: "Ninety percent of everything is crud." To get ten good words, you're going to have to write 100. I don't think it's a bad idea to teach that to kids, so long as they're taught to throw away the other 90.
Write more. Thanks. Already knew that.
I hate to sound snarky, but it's very ironic -- this entire post had the feeling of somebody sitting down to make themselves write something, anything -- without developing much original thought. In fact he quotes his cofounder quite a bit instead of coming up with insights of his own. He mixed together two very subjective ideas, "what makes good programmers" and "what makes good writers" in a way that didn't manage to shed light on either one. At least to me.
Communication is important, yes. Am I missing something? Was there something else?
Like I said, not trying to attack the writer, and I apologize if my tone is harsh. I know many times I have to write things over and over again, coming at the same topic from multiple angles, before I really nail it. Perhaps this is what's going on. (In which case I begin to wonder why it got so many votes)
Also, the site admins have cultivated a peer pressure of having answers/questions in good English on the site forcing people to sit down and formulate their typing instead of bashing the keyboard like it happens on other programmer forums. This is similar in effect to the editorial guidelines on HN, the same link on Reddit gets a very flamebaity headline whereas it's pretty tame on HN because of peer pressure.
In the traditional writer's workshop, you write something, it's passed around, and people make comments. Depending on the workshop, a good portion of the feedback can be useless. And it's quite possible that few or even none of the others are trying to write the same sort of thing as you, so you don't have a good source of contrastive examples.
Read the SO response he got again. Near instant feedback, from a peer group, with counter examples to show what worked with the readers and what didn't. Faster, better quality feedback that leads to accelerated improvement.
The author of the letter to Jeff made this very clear that the up and down votes and whether or not the answer was accepted was feedback on his/her writing and it made them better.
Authors of books have editors to make the author (and the book) better, blogs have commenters which make the blogger better, SO answers have commenters and votes to make the participants better.
So DO just go out there and write yes; but also try to get feedback for your writing because it will multiply the amount you learn by writing.
I think his central point - writing more helps you write better; StackOverflow is an easy and welcoming place to write more - is largely true, and I don't think he should be unable to say it just because it happens to promote his own interests.
I'm not sure why you doubt his sincerity. Stack Overflow is where he's spending most of his time these days, isn't it? Why wouldn't he be mentioning it in most of his posts? It seemed appropriate for this post. What would constitute a sincere blog post?
Jeff Atwood says that being a great programmer is not about having technical skill, it's about communicating well. This is clearly an observation born out of narcissistic bias, since he freely admits that he is not a great programmer, and he is much more famous for writing words than code.
I don't think it's tasteless, but de gustibus non disputandum est, which Phillip K. Dick so eloquently translated as "Those people can have bad taste and I don't care."
Nice layout of http://writers.stackexchange.com/ !
Almost every time I visit his blog I come away wondering what exactly he added to the conversation.
Many writing queries fall into the taste or reference citation categories, which aren't amenable to the correctness criteria of SO. Not to mention that there are already plenty of writing resources on the Web, so I'm skeptical of the new launch being able to distinguish itself.