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Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

Here's the "one weird tip" life hack to do all of these things: revise and rewrite.

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.

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My last writing professor didn't have a Wikipedia page, but he was fantastic, and taught with an approach on iteration: He allowed us to submit our assignments for review, and then let us take back the paper to work on it more, and we could continue to do that until it was an A paper.

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.)

Your comment made my day. That professor is one incredibly great teacher! Imagine indeed if all teaching was done like this. Standardised testing and reliance of testing memory is probably robbing generations of gifted students.

My father was a professor of business finance for a few years. He wrote on the board the first lecture that if any of the following words were misspelled, it was an automatic F:

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.

The example I gave was of a terrible writing professor: I learned no writing in her course. Because when her arbitrary requirement that the paper be in a manilla folder cost me two letter grades for the whole course, I dropped her course, rather than accept a C as my highest achievable grade. It's the sole withdrawal in my entire transcript. Furthermore, I never got any legitimate feedback on the paper, which I put a lot of time and thought into.

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.

There was a lot of skepticism with this from the students at first. They didn't take it seriously. But after the first semester, the students took a liking to "no bullshit, no excuses" and thrived on it. His classes swelled with students.

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.

But while the second year, the "word had gotten out", how many students may he have seriously harmed the careers of to make his "point" in the meantime? Would a subtler corrective action been equally effective at outputting successful students without harming others?

I more or less failed my freshman classes in college, got the kick in the pants I badly needed, straightened out, and wound up graduating with honors.

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".

I remember a story about Chuck Yeager. He was put in command of an Air Force base during the Korean War. He noticed the pilots were putting in sloppy landings.

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.

Curtis LeMay apparently had a similar issue with the abort rate over japan (Pilots making up technical issues to avoid getting over the target/flak), so his solution was "I fly in the lead plane, anyone who turns around gets court-martialled" -> abort rate drops over night.

Story is taken from "The Fog of War" as told by Robert S. McNamara.

> the second year

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.

Thank you for the story. If I have a chance teaching coding, I'll definitely steal that assignment.

> 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.

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.

Agreed completely. Related skill: learn to read and type fast, because there's no upper bound where it stops being useful. It's easier to re-read and revise if you can do both quickly. If you have half the typing speed, revising takes twice as long, and given the same amount of time you'll be able to do less of it.

> If you have half the typing speed, revising takes twice as long

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.

I'm not suggesting that revising is solely a matter of re-reading and re-typing. I'm suggesting that I've found them to be a notable component, and that I can do more revising when I can quickly take a possible revision and type it out and reread it to see how it looks.

It's true if you're using writing for thinking.

(Not claiming that that's actually faster, or otherwise.)

As someone who had issues with this before, can second this is the best advice. As well as running it by someone else to see if they're picking up on the narrative you're trying to convey.

Indeed. Although it’s ok to start with short sketches, expanding on them before finally cutting it down again. My writing often starts with a rough list of bullet points and loose thoughts before being revised, structured, properly phrased, edited repeatedly and shaped into final form.

> Rewrite it from scratch if you have to.

Rewrite from scratch as necessary. :-)

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