Good writing is a business advantage
adaged.blogspot.com
adaged.blogspot.com
* precision: This is perhaps most important. The ability to communicate tiny finite details that immediately reflects the product as a whole in a way that is universally clear to a wide audience in the same way is paramount.
* directness: Say what you mean. Don’t waste people’s time with distractions and pleasantries. Put the most important things first. If the audience wishes to read more they will.
* conciseness: There is an art to the careful description of technical details, behaviors, and examination of a subject that is both precise and still expressed in the fewest words/statements. An extended vocabulary is helpful.
* organization: Almost everything complex is open to more simplistic description as a subject of intrinsic relationships. The ability to perceive, understand, and convey those relationships is logic at its most base foundation but only when the those relationships are orderly and supported by evidence.
A common mistake is to be clever about organization, relationships, and their logic. Don’t do that. People do this as a weak form of manipulation, but strong communicators will tear it apart.
All of these points on writing are directly evident in well written code as well as formally expressed writings for general audiences.
This has been an area of concern for me. As I've increased my technical skills, I feel like my writing skills have atrophied, which impacts communication with my team and management.
As such, I found these tips very helpful.
* Ad Precision/Conciseness: When crossing disciplines from Math => Software, this annoyed me to no end: I was not able to express myself concisely. I found that vocabulary is a large part of this, I knew what I meant but did not have the words for it. This is stuff like: call site. caller callee. function signature. deployment vs. installation vs. release
Also you need good words to describe the objects/systems that you are building, and the domain your are operating in. This is why NAMING things is so critical. You need to have good words for the concepts you are working with.
* Ad Directness: Yes. But try to avoid value judgements and insults. Stay objective: "This code is shit!" vs. "I don't think the case X==0 is handled correctly."
There is the same thing in mathematics where coming up with definitions (standard library functions) are crucial. One of the biggest developments in calculus was a rigorous definition of continuity. The definition itself is complicated. However, once you encapsulate the entire concept into the single word "continuity," you can start exploring and proving many more theorems.
Totally agree! And I would add, once you have come up with a word (or label), stick with it. There is nothing worse, in technical writing, than an author who keeps using different terms for the same thing in a single document. It leaves the reader with the task of keeping track of what is being described, and thus makes the doc harder to read.
I think there are several reasons for this:
* authors showing off their extensive vocabulary
* authors trying to add novelty by using new synonyms
* authors who haven't checked other parts of the doc to see what was said elsewhere.
In technical writing, the author's job is to communicate as consistently as possible to reduce the cognitive burden on the reader.
For example if a developer were to fullfil all the criteria you listed, the result could still be extremely boring and dull for the general audience you mention.
I haven't met a single senior dev in person that could write good.
“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”
― William Strunk Jr., The Elements of Style
Precise writing is absolutely critical for communicating complex ideas, yet rarely at the front of people's minds (at least in the software world). I feel like the move to Slack and other chat apps has made the problem worse.
"Vigorous writing is concise and should contain no unnecessary words or sentences. But the goal is not conciseness per se, rather that every word tell."
The analogy with machines unnecessary; the analogy with drawing incorrect; the hypothetical writer a distraction.
And yet, it's not as forceful. Maybe he's just plain wrong?
I'd argue that the analogy is necessary--it adds force to the argument, as you note. Assuming the point of his statement is to convince the reader of something.
Side note: solid use of the semicolon there.
This is the fundamental problem.
S&W is very good at taking people who "can't write" and teaching them 1) writing is a skill, 2) you can improve by practice, and 3) the basic practice is not very hard. I don't think it's a coincidence that the book remains popular among engineers who (often justifiably, based on some bad teacher) have been turned off to writing.
But also because writing is a skill, the achievable level is very high. (Much higher than I will achieve. I have a family member who is a professional author and dabbles in software development; I see where they are in software development, and realize I'm at the same place in writing). And there are different types of writing, for different goals, towards different audiences. Persuasive writing is not the same as technical documentation is not the same as poetry!
All of this matters but S&W pretend it doesn't.
A former CTO of mine told me of their previous position (where their reportees were writing primarily Java; we were writing a different language): The value of Java is that it establishes a floor. Anyone hired could be guaranteed not to fuck things up and contribute at least X additional value or work on features of at least Y complexity, and in that market / at that scale that was more important than providing an environment that made it easy for the experts to excel (which they could still do, just with more effort).
The book offers specific rules to follow, and if you follow them you will achieve at least mediocre writing. It's the Java of informative writing. If you are awful at writing and internalize those lessons you will improve and it will probably be some kind of professional boon. But there is so much more to writing, and you do yourself such a great personal disservice if you don't at least glimpse it.
(On the other hand, at the time I told that CTO I couldn't imagine working at such a place, and they agreed it wasn't appropriate for the current workplace. Now I'm touching management level in another company where I wish more of our programmers had a "mediocre language" floor rather than the more free-wheeling approach the company has. It seems there are very few places where the rewards of expertise beat the averages. But on the other hand, I still fucking hate writing Java.)
As for the analogy: without the "drawing" part, it might at least be accurate - but a lot of its force rests on that lie. Persuading people with lies is easy, but, well, wrong.
There's also an important nuance here: clarity. Many times re-reading something I've written, I realized that I was being concise, but at the expense of clarity, by using jargon without explaining it. One needs to be careful not to be too concise, or they risk going over the reader's head.
good writing != concise writing
My friend gave me great advice: he asked "hey can you unpack that for me?" -- my text was too concise and not clear.
- Harold Abelson
Important communications should go through multiple drafts. That includes important emails. Write it all out, then re-read it carefully, ideally after a bit of time has passed. Edit with an eye toward making it shorter. Rewrite it from scratch if you have to.
I once had the good fortune to take a writing class with Edward Hoagland. We spent most of the semester with each student working on a single essay--reviewing it, editing it, rewriting it, rewriting it.
That's what I've been doing. I'm not an amazing developer, but with time and effort I am able to refactor my way to decent code.
Forgetfulness has been my ally - if you forget about something you're obviously not attached to it, so it's easier to throw it out and replace with something better.
This essentially guaranteed everyone an A in the course, if they did the work. But the focus was on getting you to improve your writing, not to fail people out. My opinion is that this is how writing should be taught, rather than giving you one shot to get a grade.
(I also once had a writing teacher who gave me a zero for a paper because it wasn't submitted in a manilla folder, and no late submissions were accepted, so I had no chance to fix it.)
1. business
2. entrepreneur
3. your, you're
4. its, it's
5. they're, their, there
Also, for the term paper due at the end of the semester, for every day the paper was late, one grade would be subtracted. I.e. 2 days late meant a B would become a D. No excuses would be accepted, as they had the entire term to get it done.
The first time he taught this course, half the students were a day or more late. He followed through. The next year, word apparently got out as he only received one late paper.
His point was that in business, excuses were not acceptable.
It's important to teach the values of timeliness and attention to detail, but you aren't teaching anything if you're not giving students a way to recover and improve.
If you're in business, and write business letters misspelling "business", you aren't going to be taken seriously (though you likely won't realize why the rejections are happening). If you graduate from a business school and can't spell "business" then the school's reputation suffers, too.
In college, you're an adult. The requirement that "business" be spelled correctly is made quite clear. No excuses, no bullshit.
Caltech had a famous class, EE91 lab. The rules were simple. The first week, you produced a spec for a project. If the spec was approved, you had the whole semester to get it done. If the project met the spec, you got an A. If you didn't, you got an F. Again, no excuses, no bullshit. It was a very popular class.
I took it too, was very careful to spec something I could accomplish and got it done well in advance.
These students aren't in kindergarten. They're adults in college. And getting your project designed, built, and debugged is a LOT harder than remembering how to spell "business".
So one day, he got the pilots together, went out to the runway, painted two strips crossways and demanded that all pilots touch down within the stripes. There was a bunch of whining about it from the pilots that it was unfair and impossible.
So Yeager fired up a jet, took off, circled the field, and landed precisely in the center between the lines. He got no more guff from the pilots and they straightened up.
Me, if I was in a combat squadron I'd choose to serve under Yeager rather than a commander that tolerated sloppy flying skills. Sloppy skills will get you killed in aviation and especially combat.
Story is taken from "The Fog of War" as told by Robert S. McNamara.
The disservice to the students was done by all their prior teachers who'd make such conditions and never enforce them, and they didn't believe my dad would, either. What was he supposed to say, this time I really really mean it? (He did say that.)
I've heard innumerable such conditions from teachers, none of them ever followed through except EE91 lab.
Rewrite from scratch as necessary. :-)
In my experience, this isn't true. When revising, most of my time is spent considering what changes I can make and not putting them into practice. If the bottleneck is thinking, raising your typing speed will provide marginal gains at best.
(Not claiming that that's actually faster, or otherwise.)
I like this expression. Your dyslexia didn't hinder your ability to come up with such original metaphor.
Elon Musk is a good example of that. I mean his writing of course :)
For example, if someone encounters a problem when running or integrating code you’ve written, you will almost always get to the heart of the problem more efficiently and with less negative emotion if you start by demonstrating that you empathize with that person’s frustration. That’s true even if the issue ends up being something on their side of the line. Acting defensive in these situations is natural, especially if you feel that anger is being directed at you unfairly, but it tends to just get in the way of finding a solution.
Esther Nam clearly explained this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYWlfVqBQLc
When people in the military ask me how to improve their spoken word I tell them to focus only on rhythm and otherwise regard their content as sewage. Once the word is flushed from your mouth you cannot have it back. If the sewage (speech) stops flowing unintentionally the system backs up and cognitive problems take over, so keep pushing words out at a regular pace. That regular pace will eliminate the need for gap words like: uh, um, and ah. The content of the sewage is generally less important than the audience's reaction, so always be ready to pivot without causing a sewage backup.
Yes, I know it is a meaningless filler phrase. I got tired of watching "American Chopper" partly because the son started every sentence with that phrase.
A colleague basically of mine basically interjected "basically" between basically every couple basically of words, basically. So I basically started basically writing basically a lot of "basically" interjections basically in my basically emails basically to basically him. Fortunately, he basically had basically a great basically sense of basically humor. Like, totally.
I will confess that what I say is usually entirely determined by what I have to say, without checking for my audience's reaction.
Writing can not be compared with speaking. Writing has the advantage of thinking over multiple times and editing before sending out the final draft.
Two excellent books are The Elements of Style and On Writing Well.
The blog author misunderstands that the BMW car video ad is deliberately not supposed to convey concrete information. Abstract ads are typical of "brand awareness advertising" vs "product specific advertising".
I made some previous comments about the difference between "concrete informational ads" vs "abstract aspirational ads"[0][1]. Yes, the ad agencies choosing to communicate abstract ads are infuriating to us but they don't care because they are going for a deliberate and calculated emotional effect.
Few people have the attention span anymore to read all of the copy in BMW's old ads. Ad agencies could hire Hemingway himself, it wouldn't make any difference. People look at the picture, the headline, and move on.
So-called brand advertising (at least, print brand advertising) serves as an admission on the part of marketers that, if they can't fit the whole AIDA model into a single ad anymore, they can at least try to push Awareness as much as possible.
Doesn't mean that brand advertising is particularly effective.
or could it be that everything is so oversaturated with ads that spending two minutes voluntarily reading fluffy ad copy just doesn't seem like a great use of time, even if it's well written?
attention span is its own problem, but connecting the two like this seems... odd.
---
EDIT, had more thoughts on this
i mean, i like the old VW Beetle ads. they're charming and clever and i enjoy reading them. but that's because the element of "trying to get me to buy something" isn't relevant anymore, i'm experiencing the (long-dead) ad willingly. but if the ad is a normal ad i see in a magazine... no way i'm giving it my undivided attention for two minutes just so it can manipulate me into liking X
It's not so much that they don't write copy, it's that they try to avoid telling you that it's copy
Few brand owners or ad agencies also want to produce an ad that doesn't play globally. It's harder for things to get lost in (literal) translation when there are fewer words to translate. It's cheaper too!
> a deliberate and calculated emotional effect.
When there is no concrete information the emotional effect for me is to close the video. All this "aspirational" puts me off and I'll think "only vapid and empty people like this".
High quality luxus items have a quality of their own which has nothing to do with aspirational aspects.
Luxury items MAY be high quality but they MUST be aspirational.
for example, clothing construction at the higher levels is not exactly easy to judge. I don't know anything about stitching patterns or common fail points, but if Ralph Lauren advertise in a way that suggests that the people who wear their clothes are also the people who wear Rolex and drive Mercedes, people will make that connection.
Even if you think immune to this stuff, you aren't. If you think you could be classified into any particular social group, you are probably riddled with these kind of beliefs. I think it takes a prolonged and deliberate effort to avoid the tricks of advertising
My tailored suits already opened my eyes before, but in common day items it is ever more apparent to me now. Seams that don't fit or are crooked, stitches missing etc.
With respect to BMW or Audi etc. Most of the 'quality' comes from constant re-iteration of reviewers calling something high-quality, just because it is the way they know it.
Do you really believe these ad makers are so infallible that they can't completely misread their target audience? Or are you making the mistake of believing that the target audience is by definition the ones who like the ad?
Maybe if you’re Elon Musk, who’s top 0.001% of human business talent, but even he’s had over a decade at it and isn’t yet churning out cash.
I'm not Elon Musk, but I don't need to be and neither does anyone else. There's absolutely no reason to believe that any person (not specifically me) ,who is not in BMW, could in fact have a good insight to something they're doing wrong. People commenting here on HN could be working in marketing or marketing adjacent industries and notice problems that are very hard to see from within the organization itself.
In fact I'd argue that nearly every organization has some sort of blindspot and bias that informs their work due to the company's history and structure. And it's not necessarily true that those biases materialize in ways that are beneficial.
BMW is no exception.
My only point is to consider here: is BMW default wrong or is BMW default correct?
My default is to understand why a system behaves how it does before using my own value system to say why it’s wrong.
Part of this progression of thought is there’s usually very good reasons as to why things are how they are. It’s really hard to outsmart lots of time, money, and people.
It’s my belief that until we understand the thought, theory, and progression of events that led the system’s current state, we’ll probably make similar path-dependent mistakes when we propose solutions so I assume the system is default correct until it’s fully understood.
My point about Elon (who’s considered a success to some :)) has had industry marketing success but it took him over a decade and billions to do it.
I would definitely not argue that BMW is default wrong, but I also would not argue that they are default correct.
I think our difference of opinion here is rooted in our different understandings of the power of money, time, and people.
All three of those are very important and are definitely a multiplier on the ability of an organization to both advance and implement some solution.
However, my opinion is that those things aren't the only factor that lead to a successful solution. Your root ideas that you're using those three things for must be based on a core idea that's correct. I'm saying that, that core idea could be completely wrong or misguided. Especially in this case where BMW seems to be targeting a new demographic, with a new product. Right now they're in a learning phase in my opinion. And yes they can use some of their institutional knowledge from similar marketing pushes in the past to make sure the message for this EV is polished. But that past knowledge only goes so far. Drawing analogies and parallels between the two (historical marketing efforts and this modern one) fall flat in key ways. They are not and cannot ever line up 1:1 where the knowledge transfer just gives them a working cookie cutter recipe that works 100% of the time.
So going back to approaching the same thing from opposite sides, I think I'm really getting at this same thing you said "It’s my belief that until we understand the thought, theory, and progression of events that led the system’s current state". However, I'd take a different fork and say that while understanding all of those things is important, it doesn't mean that the theory and the process of implementation are necessarily fault free. I'd say that there's actually 3 options here: BMW is default wrong, BMW is default correct, or BMW is somewhere in between default wrong and default correct.
I think it's the latter where no organization is ever on the extreme ends. So really I think our disagreement is base around how various factors unique to them play into which way they "lean" on this continuum leading to the likelihood that they're correct.
Marketing gaffes and the need to readjust after getting feedback while launching a new campaign are common in my experience. (Yes, I know, my experience haha). But the best way I can judge a situation without having first hand details... which many of us here don't and we're just all talking for fun. Is to use my experiences, value system, etc. to voice an opinion that is definitely up for debate.
But I definitely don't think this specific situation is as black or white as "you're not their target"
I take that as evidence that the ads work and the ad makers haven't "misread the target audience".
He certainly understands the concept of brand and product advertising.
Even though the IT employees would constantly make snide remarks about her having a "soft degree", management loved her because she could take technical information, even if she didn't fully understand it herself, and translate it into a format that could be understood by the rest of the company.
So it is encouraging that technical people display some human traits :)
A lot of 'coder-first' programmers might see themselves at a disadvantage in job prospects in the future, especially compared to a math, stats, engineering, chemistry, physics, biology, history, geography, accounting, business, or any other majors really, who not only know how to code well enough for most jobs, but most importantly, how to apply their knowledge of programming to unique problems in their complex field.
A lot of other fields do a great job at training you to be an independent investigator first and foremost, specific knowledge second. This is one of the shortcomings mentioned to me from my friends who graduated with CS degrees: a lack of solid reinforcement on hypothesis driven analytical thinking especially, and too much emphasis on algorithms they never used again once they passed that particular exam.
A hiring manager therefore might take the polymath who knows programming over one of the thousands of applications they get every year from dime a dozen computer science graduates with great grades from a big school and some random capstone project on their github.
Sadly not my experience in the UK - it's all top grades in maths/physics/comp sci, x years experience on x ridiculously long and highly specific list of technical skills.
The kind of black-and-white thinking that programmers are understandably prone to often leads to them denying the existence of their own blind spots.
Plenty of techies can (and do) do it all. The opposite - not so much.
I'm not sure how you don't recognize that that is EXACTLY the point being made: tech people think that the work of non-tech people is less important, less critical, and more easily done then their work. And that their work is special in that non-tech people are not capable of taking up a role at a keyboard and doing a good job.
I'm having a difficult time understanding how your statements can be interpreted any other way.
I told myself for years that it would be "easy" to quit smoking, and in the end, it actually was. The hard part is that it just plain isn't fun. In a funny way, quitting smoking gave me more empathy for nontechnical work.
As for quitting smoking our experience is different there too. But glad we both quit. :)
And yeah, I think for the most part people learn to find some kind of joy or at least entertainment in what they do for work. Or they learn to be miserable sustainably.
He says, "Good writing is a business advantage that goes beyond almost anything outside of real transformative technological leaps," just after explaining how the Tesla Model S is basically the same as the Ford Model T.
This is, dare I say it, exceedingly bad writing.
Is it easier for me to work out what the hell you do by looking up your company on Wikipedia than it is is by looking at your website.
A surprising number of companies fail the Wikipedia test, because marketing and management somehow feel that simple language sdescrtibing what they do somehow devalues the importance. "We're valuable because we're complex. Our marketing material needs to make what we do seem very complex".
The company website on the other hand has many more objectives.
- the ones who wrote/edit wikipedia articles for random companies aren't the the Marketing/PR departments of such companies;
- Marketing and management feel that simple language devaluates the company importance;
When in reality, any company should keep an eye on their wikipedia page - if not them, then who the hell has the best knowledge to update it.
Sucessfull companies have pretty straightforward and simple communication, that's why they pay specialists to do it, or do it in house with specialists of their own.
Unless you're talking about a random company where the marketing is done by someone who had to fill for the marketing guy that left the week before, because he said in a lunch break that he had graphic design course in colege.
If that's the case, then why bring it up as a generalization, since is a bad practice, and indeed the exception to the rule? Or the goal is to state the obvious: there are bad marketers/managers like there are bad developers/artists/electricians/MDs/nurses and any other profession done by people.
In the end, the proof is in the pudding. Is this selling cars? It's very hard to measure the marginal effect of one ad, but to the extent that we can do it, this is what the yardstick of advertisement is.
edit: putting -> pudding typo
That has made me an adult with no real skills except the ability to communicate very well. More specifically, I'm able to write very well. And I find it staggering how many people cannot write with any quality.
Rewinding to college - I funded my beer and fun fund by writing other people's term papers. The first year or two out of school I paid the rent by writing other people's term papers. I run a marketing business now and despite my hatred for spending the time writing longform, a good chunk of our revenue comes from people overpaying for content simply because finding good writers is hard.
While many people say that understanding how to code is perhaps the most valuable skill available to young people during their education, I would offer that writing well is of greater significance and use. There are plenty of excellent careers, vocations, and paths in life where any measure of success can be reached without knowing how to code. There are far fewer where not being able to write is not a hindrance.
I suspect the issue is that it’s really easy to evaluate technical skills like coding, but I am not sure since I don’t work in a writing-focused occupation.
If you are moved, the writing is good.
This is in contrast with other fields where "goodness" also requires other longer-term less tangible goals that are invisible to non-professionals. If a program does what you want right now, it may still not be made of good code because it can be hard to maintain, or fail catastrophically in edge cases or otherwise lack in ways that aren't immediately obvious.
You can be a poor chef who makes tasty food if your personality causes high staff turnover or your ingredient choices and pricing kill your profitability, all of which is hidden from the diner.
But the point of writing is to get an idea lodged in someone's head as effectively as possible, and we're pretty good at evaluating whether that's happened. The only case where it can clearly break down is journalism where the ideas you transmit must be factual in ways that require external validation. A compelling news story that is false may be good "writing" at some level, but isn't good journalism.
How do you evaluate and improve your own writing? Is this something that requires simply seeing the reactions of other people, or is it something you are able to simulate in your head? I think the reason why I thought it would be hard for other people to evaluate writing skills, is that I find it hard to tell when my own explanations are easy for other people to understand.
The point of writing is to express an idea. You prove this to others by providing relevant metaphors (with respect to the subject, and to the intended audience), supporting ideas or evidence, and tie everything together into a concise, organized format.
"How do you tell if your writing is good quality?"
People listen. People take your opinion seriously. People respect you, and mimic your ideas or style of writing. The evaluation of writing quality is almost always a subconscious process, since analyzing communication itself is somewhat meta.
"it's really easy to evaluate technical skills like coding"
It's easy to evaluate coding, in some sense, because it's easy to communicate to a computer. Humans are much better than computers at thinking, communicating, evaluating, and responding to their input. So no, evaluating writing is more difficult and more subjective than evaluating coding ability.
The marketing team didnt understand my objection not because they were stupid but because the standard had been acceptably low for some time.
Since this is HN, I'm going to add a shameless plug.
For 4 years I've run Write Battle, a game for writers (originally anyone writing emails, instant messages, etc...but user base has largely turned out to be marketers) to compete against each other to devise the most concise prose. The best writing wins, as judged by brevity (response length) and readability (Flesch-Kincaid).
Right now, as we speak, I'm turning these games into a set of interactive, gamified, bite-size courses to teach the basics of effective writing without boring reading or lectures. I should have the first set of (free) courses done in about a week [0].
My approach is that while grammar and formal rules are important, practical effect is more important, so the games and courses I've made so far focus more on effectiveness than theory and rules. Turns out writing is more fun that way too!
Yes -- I send the best responses out in an email after some manual sifting, after live scoring for a game has ended.
I wasn't sure if showing the best answers immediately would encourage some people to play again with "help", putting others at a disadvantage.
But now that you mention it, that doesn't make sense. Even if human scoring is over, players should still be sent an email of the best responses from past human evaluation.
Thanks for all the feedback! Looks like I have some work to do.
To me good writing is about communicating your point well. It's hard to tell what I'm supposed to communicate from a few isolated lines.
> Cybercrime is viewed as a serious threat to the prosperity and security of developed states, prompting the adoption of cyber security strategies across a range of countries. Although some malicious cyber activities are carried out in the pursuit of military or political objectives, a high proportion of cybercrime is financially motivated. According to one report, this was the case for 76% of all data breaches in 2017.
I had to read it three times to understand it. I could try to make it present the information in a clearer way - maybe something like this?
> Many countries adopt cyber security strategies to mitigate threat from cyberattacks. Although some attacks are means to a political end, 76% of all data breaches are financially motivated.
(The algorithm didn't think this was a valid response, but I like it.)
But it feels hollow because I don't understand what the prompt is trying to communicate. The average person eats almost 1500 pounds of food a year. Is it trying to say that countries shouldn't worry about cyberattacks? Why does it conflate cyberattacks to data breaches? There is no thesis or argument, they seem like disconnected and soulless facts. In good writing, every sentence has a purpose, and they build to a conclusion. Wasn't it confusing when I mentioned how much food the average person eats when it had no clear relevance to anything? That's how I felt with all the prompts I got. This still seems like a cool site but I was a little let down.
Part of what makes these games so playable is that they're quick and don't require a whole lot of thought. It's a compromise. The intention is for players to focus more on improving the technical aspects of the writing presented instead of thinking too deeply about the message because more context and more text to edit might add too much friction to the experience (i.e., make the "game" into more of a "task").
I know it might not help a whole lot, but each game has a tiny bit of context to help...the context for the current game (shown right above the game-play box) is "Opening sentence of a research paper by a think tank."
Anyway, I'll think about ways to address this. Thanks for the feedback.
However I will also add that while these games are meant to be more fun than serious...the "courses", on the other hand, will take message, content, audience, etc into account and generally be much more thorough.
anchpop - your response wasn't considered valid because it did not include the term "cybercrime". In hindsight this was a bad decision on my part -- each game has a small set of strings that a response must include to be considered valid (to avoid spam responses from messing up scoring). "Cybercrime" probably shouldn't be one of them (sorry).
Good writing is paramount for both of these contexts. From good text formatting to realizing what the audience is and adjusting level of detail and pace accordingly.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=technical+writing
And while this is orthogonal, I’m sure there’s some overlap: this is a list of links I’ve compiled on giving technical talks. I haven’t checked the links for years, so I’m sure a few are broken.
I'd say it is no more than 20 degrees off.
The initial reaction of most educated people is probably horror at our new illiterati leaders, but in an attempt to be optimistic, I’d note that the widespread dominance of writing is something of a material historical accident. Languages were originally spoken, not written. It’s been suggested that the semi-mythical Homer was specifically depicted as blind in order to emphasize that poetry is an aural art, not a visual (textual) one. If somehow audio recording devices had been invented prior to paper, I think we’d be living in a far different society, one filled with audio recordings rather than books.
So, knowing this, the challenge is to adapt to this new reality and form of communication and learn how to utilize it to achieve the level of depth seen in literature. I’m fairly confident we’ll get there eventually: the art of writing has been around for thousands of years, whereas video/film (moving images) is barely over a century old. We’ve got time to master it.
Audio has some advantages, but it's limited.
I adore good English. IMO writing peaked in the middle of the last century. There are some beautifully literate, clean, elegant, but unpretentious books from that period. Like this one:
https://www.amazon.com/Structures-Things-Dont-Fall-Down-eboo...
Elegance and simplicity started to become rarer in the 70s, when writing became more about ego, forceful persuasion, and opinionation and less about communication.
Then YouTube happened, and now we're in the hyper-emotive era of "Wassup fam?" and "Mash that Like button." And memes.
Some of it is certainly entertaining - because it has to be. But it's not so good at sharing complex and nuanced world views.
So I don't think we will get there, because moving pictures and sound are inherently not a literate medium. They can be a literary medium, but you get Maximum User Engagement™ with crude lowest-common-denominator content, and not with subtlety, difficulty, or complexity.
The first writing by cavemen was probably scribbles, too. I'd give video another thousand years before writing it off.
And to be clear: I am a writer by profession myself. So I'm definitely on the side of "writing is important." I'm merely acknowledging that technology trends are changing.
> ...crude lowest-common-denominator content, and not with subtlety, difficulty, or complexity.
It goes beyond this. Grokking complex ideas through media goes well beyond text. Often times visual media can bridge cultural gaps and be a primer for learning a new language. Don't discount the platform with generalizations (which I understand you're not trying to do) about its content. I regularly subscribe to channels that communicate complex subtext under a veneer of sensationalism. Even your quoted language can have an ironic meta game that supports both mine and your arguments.
Let's start with cars: why has George gone out of his way to put down Tesla, lumping it in to his "not-a-new-product" category, and decided to purchase an objectively inferior electric vehicle (BMW)?
Maybe he likes the look of BMWs. I hope so. Or maybe he cannot stomach Tesla because it represents the exact antidote to his entire argument: an "incremental" product that requires no marketing or writing to easily outsell the competition. If the future looks like a world where there are no "new products" and great writing will be the meaningful differentiator between products, why has Tesla decided to forgo writing altogether, great or not?
He makes a few salient points on the outskirts of the article. But the crux of his argument is "good writing goes beyond almost anything outside of real transformative technological leaps," one of which is not Tesla, as noted earlier.
If you had to bet the future of societal progress on improving products vs. improving writing, which would you choose?
If the future of advertising follows the future of autos, then I'm sorry but George will be out of a job pretty soon here.
For all the hackers that get scared by these articles and run out to take a writing class: don't. Focus on creating great products. As Elon does, let the products speak for themselves.
Also George, small typo in paragraph 16: "I called by system "the three Ds.""
Like any skill, practice is the most important thing. Training helps, especially grammar & structure coaching. That said, tools can help:
- Hemmingway[0] has been useful to me. I often use it to revise things I write elsewhere.
- Grammarly [1] seems good, but I refuse to pipe everything I write to (another) cloud. If I could run it locally or get a private on-prem instance for my firm, that would be great.
- Microsoft's new AI Editor [2] seems promising.
[0] http://www.hemingwayapp.com/
[1] https://www.grammarly.com/
[2] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/in...
It sounds weird but I not only take pride in writing documentation for my software, I actually enjoy doing so as well.
I'm sure this would result in a large pay cut but it may be worth it for the change of pace.
I actually wrote an article about exactly that, fairly recently: https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/leaving-a-legacy-1c2ddb0c...
It’s a fairly long read, compared to most of my articles, but I feel that it’s an important topic.
My biggest issue with most modern tech writing, is that it is actually painful to read.
It may be 100% correct, and impart very important information, but if I can use it as a soporific, there’s a problem.
I find that writing in the vernacular, injecting personal anecdotes and [very carefully-chosen] humor and humanity into tech writing helps.
I write about extremely technical stuff; often walking through significant code trails, but I have had non-technical people praise my writing, and read the entire article.
I do agree with the author that good writing is a business advantage. E.g. developers who are good at writing blog posts or email newsletters can become widely known (and booked). I don't see the author make a compelling argument in the article that supports this though.
That said, while well written, I don't agree with his argument. In general selling - well, actually buying - is mostly driven by emotions and less factual. Even B2B is emotiinal. "Will this decision help my career?"
We don't buy what X does (i.e., features). We buy benefits. That is, "what's in it for me?" Yes, it makes sense to be upfront about features. Of course. But it's benefits that sell.
By the way, in the sentence you wrote, people used to use the subjunctive mood, "I wish there were"; this "rule" seems to have gone the way of the dinosaur and "was" in place of the conditional "were" sounds so terribly wrong to me (probably because of the German "wäre").
That sounds familiar...
There's no substitute for repetitiveness and habit.
Feedback is important, but also valuable. It can be hard to get good feedback for free.
I've found that just slapping stuff up there is important, as long as I keep doing it, and make sure that whatever I "slap up" is of the best quality possible.
Every few weeks, I stop what I'm doing, and spend a day or so, writing up an entry about something. My usual read length is under fifteen minutes, but I have a couple of prolix entries.
You can see what I write here: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/ and here: https://medium.com/chrismarshallny
I'm not a widely-read author, but everything I do; whether coding or writing, is done as if I were publishing to the masses.
Establishes good habits.
I also find that writing in the vernacular seems to be received well. But that's just me. YMMV.
The only problem is finding someone or a group to receive good feedback.
https://www.plainlanguage.gov/resources/articles/dash-writin...
Many more: https://www.plainlanguage.gov/resources/articles/
General education courses, required courses in history and humanities, they provide a different way of critically thinking about things, and their frequently heavy writing focus is excellent practice for a skill that will be extremely useful in life, even if it isn't directly tied to your STEM program.
Consider this: And enormous amount of your quality of life, your career advancement, and many other things are directly tied to your ability to convince other people of your way of thinking. And writing is a fundamental vehicle for that process.
Once your code "works," nobody cares about it -- they're on to the next thing -- and then the next time it receives attention is if something goes wrong, or something changes either coming in or going out. It is then that your code will receive attention again. Having good docs on hand is going to make that quite a lot better.
The ad created mixed feelings for me. Frankly, it could have done away with the voice over. Especially since it did not make much sense.
In a practical sense, the story told through video was sufficient.
Aesthetically, I dislike the new look. It looks nothing like I8 I was expecting to see, but that is a personal preference. Inside looks futuristic and cool, but not much more can be said beyond that.
I am oddly disappointed with BMW. They have all the money they need to unseat Tesla, but they just can't seem to hack it. Eh, maybe Taycan will change the field somewhat.
I feel like it's a daily occurrence that I have to read between the lines of what people say and construct my own reply that does the heavy lifting of moving the ball forward by outlining the different possibilities based on what was said.
There's a sense in which lazy writers are offloading thinking onto others. This sort of drive-by writing is pretty annoying IMO. And when there's not someone in the room willing to do the meta-thinking of clarifying, it can lead to misunderstanding or arguments.
This is as someone who doesn't know much about English but have built a company for English speakers.
- Writing clearly requires empathy. If you write documentation, you must put yourself in the shoes of your confused users.
- Writing requires storytelling skills. Writing something pleasant to read is no small task.
- Writing requires social skills. How you write things dictates how well they'll be received. You have to sell your arguments and convince people with very different priorities.
There are great writers who are not able to organise their ideas very well.
I think good business writing isn't really the same thing as creative writing though they are both assets.
The ability to explain something very quickly in simple and succinct terms, so that the value is really well understood by an audience without any context ... this is the key.
I've built a pretty great and remunerative career on being able to understand technical things well enough to write about them for a less technical audience.
I love the author's sense of humor.