I wish I could write this well | Hacker News Reader

I wish I could write this well

blog.royalsloth.eu

57 pointskaeruct24 comments

Maybe this is not the main point of the article, but English as a foreign language can be felt differently based on your main language.

Writing clearly is hard but possible, but writing interesting stories is desperately hard and intimidating, if your main language is far from English in its nature.

My main language is Japanese. As far as I know, there is no English-writing Japanese tech blogger who is even modestly recognized. I have never seen a tech article written by Japanese here in HN - with a few exceptions. (I think I can probably spot it if I see it - The tech community is much smaller there.) On the other hand, there are several OSS projects or developers which/who are based on Japan but still somehow popular.

I agree that the writing ability is very nice to have, but sometimes, it can be more effective to invest the time to purely technical skills. They are often less biased by the natural language skills. The Japan-based authors of a few exceptional posts are exceptional programmers: Their articles are mere by-products of their primary contributions, which are the great code they've written.

I lived in Sweden until I was 7, but then lived most of my life in the US and never got any formal Swedish education. I still talk Swedish with a slight American accident and my Swedish writing is definitely very American styled. Regardless of that, I've been told at work that I may be one of the best writers in the company. My only strategy is to keep it rewrite it a couple times and keep it clear and to the point and think about what I'm actually trying to convey. The result is apparently that my writing is basically the best despite the periodic funny (and noticeable) weirdness that I throw in there.

So I totally agree with your last paragraph. In my case (as apparently in this one), I'm not writing just for writing sake. As such, the most important thing might just be to get out of the way and the let the subject matter speak for itself.

Swedish is so simple in style and so close to English that knowing it might actually help your English writing. English is my third foreign language, it is almost given that I won't be proficient in it unless I devote all my time communicating only in English, which I can't see being feasible.

I mean it is and it isn't. The main larger points of style are definitely extremely similar. But the smaller tail of tiny stylistic elements are basically never ending (just as with every language). My my English writing is not at the level of fine literature, but it is certainly much closer than my Swedish writing is. But at the same time, if I read well-written Swedish I can identify basically all the finer stylistic points. Overall it's just certainly an issue of practice. Even if I live in Sweden, I still write mostly in English.

The same thing applies to other fields. Fifteen years ago, I was helping to develop an English-language scientific writing program for undergraduates at a Japanese university, and for a year I read nearly every issue of Science and Nature to familiarize myself with scientific writing. I noticed many research papers by Japanese scientists but no essays or journalistic articles.

I myself am a native speaker of English who, after decades of reading and speaking Japanese, started occasionally to write essays in the language. Though some publishers have been kind enough to print them, the writing process has always been a struggle, I am never confident about my choice of words or expressions, and I am always grateful for the corrections and improvements made by the editors.

Here is what I want to say: After 16 years in a English speaking country, I don't feel articulate. But that's hardly the point. What I want to say always gets muddled with words I didn't intend to write.

I started a blog because I believed the only way to learn to write well was by writing. After 8 years, I still struggle communicating my ideas properly, effectively and quickly enough. Yet, every blog I read the authors seems to have mastered communication. But then sometimes, something I write becomes popular. I received emails or praise about my writing style. Some will say that "no one could have said it better".

If you and I don't feel as articulate, it's because we are the authors. Our ideas change, evolve, and improve. Everything you put down becomes an older version of your thoughts. No matter how good it was, the present you have learned something new to add. I wish I could write well, but even if I did, I'd look back at what I wrote in the past and still say "I wish I could write well".

You have to think critically about yourself to improve. As you improve you find more to criticise.

I remember one full time ski instructor telling me they thought they had skied three good turns that season!

If you were to ask the world champion at golf or tennis how they felt about their form, they would be able to write a treatise on all the mistakes they made.

I agree with the talents bit. This article somehow reminded me of Richard Feynman saying that scientists are "just people" who really likes thinking and looking into stuff. Ultimately, I tend to think that one's talent is really an obsession with something. If you can turn your obsession to be something marketable, you'd be successful.

Which got me thinking, why do we refer to someone as talented when we know that they weren’t born with this skill? You weren’t born with the ability to speak, write stories or make computer programs. It’s a skill that you have have learned over time, mostly due to spending a lot of hours in that particular field.

Except they are born with it. IQ is innate and correlated with relative (to one's peers) writing and math ability. People with talent get more millage for their effort. Someone with a high IQ will grasp concepts faster.

http://greyenlightenment.com/2021/04/25/why-talent-beats-gri...

Sure, natural capabilities matter when you are competing with the best in the world, but for most people competing with the best is not a part of their daily job.

Unless your job is low-skilled, getting a good, high-paying job means having to compete with other presumably talented applicants for that job.

At the same time, unless you're literally competing (ie tournaments) https://danluu.com/p95-skill gets into how getting to a high percentile often comes down to getting fundamentals right

Of course a lot of people don't have so much disposable time to achieve excellence. High school was an opportune time for me to spend years getting good at programming. But if you can manage to get into the 90th percentile of a skill it should be enough to get an entry position. It's easier to find time to hone one's craft when you're being paid to do it

IQ doesn't dictate skills until you get bellow 100. Above that it really only tells you about learning speed.

I think "talented" is a fine word to use to describe someone who wasn't born with a skill, but who honed their talent with lots of practice.

"Gifted" might be a word I would use to describe someone who was simply born better suited for a certain task than others.

Talent is just survivorship bias.

At an early age a person randomly tries a bunch of different things, and by luck they happen to do one of those things in an optimal way. They keep doing it that way and pretty soon they improve and develop a lead over their peers that is difficult to overcome. Thus a talent is born.

I’m not a native English speaker, either. The biggest challenge for me is to write English sentences without grammatical errors. To do that, you need feedbacks that tell you whether your sentences are correct, that’s especially hard when you neither live in an English-speaking country nor have an English-speaking friend. Online language learning forums help a little bit, but they are not enough if you want constant feedbacks.

Not sure if you did that on purpose, but you would say, "you need feedback", not making it plural

Same here. I'd recommend tools like Grammarly or something similar (like spell correction on Gmail/GDocs). They at least catch basic errors. Although many incorrect-but-not-right kinds of errors fall through, you'll feel embarrassed much less often.

Some feedback:

1) "Feedback" is uncountable

2) The long sentence starting with "To do that" should be split into two after "correct". As written, the clause that follows is completely standalone and there is no conjunction to connect it to the rest of the sentence.

3) This is more of a style thing, but I would expand the word "that" in "that's especially hard". For example, into "getting this feedback". Why? Because "that" should refer to some concept you already mentioned, but there is nothing in the preceding sentence it can meaningfully point to. What's hard? Needing feedback? No, getting the feedback is hard, but that phrase doesn't appear anywhere, so you have a dangling pointer :)

Thanks for the feedback!

Same here. The grammar of my main language is very flexible compare to English. There is no grammatical for tenses and plurals.

I would love to be able to write as well in your language as you write in English.

well written article. english speaking and writing ability in a population can also signal where I would like the to say the society is headed whether in terms of opening up or just general affairs. also english ability is why the us software industry is so ahead of other countries e.g japan where in the case of the mp3 player they had the hardware but couldn't write could enough software to make an ipod. n in something discussed this past week on hn, about european software - the tech hub countries e.g netherlands, sweden etc have are english proficient.

Is it though? I checked my initial bias of assuming the rest of the blog would be well written after the author declared himself a skilled writer along with the accompanying validation of another person deeming so as well.

I was still a bit thrown off guard to come across "grammar" issues with certain phrases. Whatever the proper word is here I'm not sure, but there were some missing words, e.g "ran out steam", as well as weird terms like "iron practices".

But also, maybe my tendency to perform psychoanalysis and evaluate reaction to new information doesn't make me a better reviewer so much as a default critic.

Anyway I'm terrible with english and probably dyslexic. Just caught up in how I read that thing & my ongoing reaction to it. think too much... Just a blog....

Edit: oh yea, forgot to mention that the lead up and cliff hanger type ending threw me off without an "ah-ha" or laugh

"My ability to write in English came down to jotting down a few lousy sentences and eventually I ran out steam."

That sounds more like writer's block. Getting past that requires either discipline or something to say.

Incidentally, is it time to retire "ran out of steam" as a phrase? Nobody knows enough about steam locomotives any more for that to be a meaningful analogy. The phrase is usually misused, anyway.

Unless the fire in a steam locomotive is built up before approaching a long hill, steam pressure will drop as steam consumption increases going uphill.[1] Underpowered or overloaded locomotives could lose enough pressure to stall on the hill. Some had insufficient power to get started again from that condition. The driver and fireman are expected to "get up a head of steam" before the hill, to avoid that embarrassment.

So "running out of steam" really refers to not having enough power due to lack of preparation.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtrkiKo0lFE

But if we retire our anachronisms —- steam, sail, animal husbandry, farming —- what metaphors will English have left?

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