Hacker News Reader

Comment by csours | Hacker News Reader

This really strikes me as the sort of advice where one may say: It worked for me, and if it doesn't work for you it's your fault.

Very broadly speaking, there are two kinds of writers: those who just start writing and go where the writing takes you, and those who develop an outline first. In the case of the first set, it is vital to do a heavy editing pass or re-write iteration.

I don't think anyone tackles a thesis without some kind of outline, but I also doubt the universality of this advice. Some people need to explore their ideas before structuring them.

All that being said, this is full of good advice, such as:

"When you write for them (the audience), you put forth effort to make your product good: neat, complete, proffed (sic), unified, cogent, etc. That is, you craft and polish a well designed product for them to read. However, if you [yourself] are the audience such effort is a waste."

View on HN

The author of this piece is a computer scientist (as opposed to a humanities professor), and in that domain their advice is quite reasonably universal.

It's almost unimaginable to write a (PhD) thesis in computer science without an extremely detailed outline. The thesis is not some thing you come up with whole-cloth, and it is certainly not a substantial dump of novel work.

The CS PhD thesis is typically a function of between three and 10+ previously published & peer reviewed papers. The exact function used to combine these previous publications into a thesis can range from `concat` (the "big stapler" thesis) to a substantial rewriting.

The level of rewriting depends on many factors, e.g., the advisor's style, the norms in the department/country, the quality of previous published papers, and of course pedestrian things such as the student's promised start date for their first post-graduation position and/or the amount remaining grant money.

But in any case, there's going to be a rather small design space in terms of the overall high level outline. The choice of chapters -- and even the internal organization of those chapters -- will mostly match previously published work.

In some sense, CS theses are closer to an anthology than a book. There's a bit of design work you can do around the edges to make things into a coherent whole, but you're not going to be making substantial modifications to the meat of the thing.

Is it a waste? I find my confidence and satisfaction levels in my understanding increase after I craft and polish a well-designed product for reading. It confirms that my logic isn't garbage.

I kind of see good writing as a form of artisan-ry. Sure, any old chair will do, but an artisan-crafted chair can be truly comfortable instead of just helping you not-stand.

The purpose of writing is to communicate. If "communicating your idea" is all you wanted to do, you could just release an outline or slide deck. Good writing makes your communication more effective, while also being more enjoyable (read: ergonomic, tailor-made, whatever your goal is) for the reader.

I think it's definitely worth a read, and take the good ideas, but I wouldn't take it as dogmatically as the author makes it sound.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com