One UChicago scholar has shaped writing for generations of students

His video "The Craft of Writing Effectively": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM

The Joseph M. Williams in the introduction is, of course, the author of IMO the best book about writing, bar none: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Style:_Lessons_in_Clarity_and_...

Larry McEnerney's video opens by asserting how academics (and others) write not to persuade, but as an integral part of their personal thinking/explaining process. Instead, for grant applications and other works, they need to be persuading. The remainder of the talk is focused on tools for writing persuasively, such as understanding the audience, complying with the reader's expectations, and creating enough controversy/difference that the work is seen as new and building upon prior art.

I took this course, from Larry personally, 30 years ago. It was one of the best courses I ever took.

Prior to that, my writing was abysmal. My high school English teachers were helpless. And I even managed to get through Princeton barely understanding the mechanics of putting together a coherent argument. Start a paragraph with a topic sentence? No one ever told me that.

It was so bad that I sought this course out. To the best of my recollection, it wasn't offered in the business school, so I had to make a special effort to take it.

It paid off. I wish I could take it again, just as a refresher.

Little Red Schoolhouse was one of my favorite classes during undergrad at UChicago, and the one that I still use lessons from almost every single day. I also happened to live in the dorm where Larry was Resident Master, so I got to spend some time with him over Master's tea – he's a very kind person as well as an exceptional writing teacher. I saw an earlier thread about his retirement on LinkedIn and sent him an email to make sure he had seen it too, but never heard back – I hope he's seen the outpouring of gratitude from his former students that's accompanied the announcement of his retirement!

Yeah. This. We hackers should remember that the stuff we write, be it code, docs, proposals, business plans, security incident postmortems, whatever, needs to be VALUABLE to the readers -- the people -- we intend to reach. If it isn't valuable, they won't read or use it. If they don't read or use it, we've just wasted a lot of our time, and a little bit of theirs. Ouch.

We're not trying to show people what WE think about anything. We're trying to influence how THEY think.

This is tricky with code, because many members of our audience are future developers with less experience than us. Our brilliance is worthless to them. What's valuable to them is the ability to modify or built on what we did to solve their problems, problems we didn't forsee.

Ask: what do our readers / users need to know / do? How can we convince them we CAN help them? Only THEN do we get to try to help them.

The concept of community gatekeepers might explain part of the fundamental divide relating to political conversation happening in the US. There are different groups, different codes, different value systems. These groups would never naturally converge. Bringing them together would require an impossible amount of effort. The power structure will actively reject attempts to coopt the group thinking by the other. One example from academia that comes to mind is the divide between 'freshwater' and 'saltwater' economics. Teasing out most effective codes for persuasion and influence would be an interesting exercise.