Comment by thiago_fm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thiago_fm | Hacker News Reader

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Writing.

Writing is the gym for the brain. It will give you a lot of clarity on your thoughts and also improve how you speak. Your mind will be enhanced and it will affect positively all the aspects of your life.

Everybody writes, but very few do it deliberately. Most of the people, just write. They rarely even think about what they wrote. You will sound smarter. Not because of choice of words, but because you will begin to think clearly.

In the first three decades of my life. My schooling was second-rate and I've started to learn english quite late. Both my reading and writing skills were absolutely inferior to kids with a privileged background. My literacy as a kid was close to zero. My main focus was math, code and video games.

Then, having progressed in life mostly because of my technical skills and hard work, at some point I've felt my career had stalled. All my peers came from a much richer background than I and have studied in much better schools and I've started to dig into what could take me to the next level and to compete side-by-side with them.

One thing I've noticed is that I've never had a writing class before. Never. Just a few activities that one could count in one of their hands during my whole school and university life.

I've started then to write down my thoughts, then think and write. Practicing different exercises. Reading more and paying attention to other writers, to their cadence and style.

Inevitably my writing started to improve. I haven't have focused much on grammar so far and will certainly do at a later stage, as I feel there is still progress to be made in organising my thoughts.

If it interests you, try it. Feel free to send me an email if you have trouble to find time or what to write about, I can try to help you out. Let's progress together.

> One thing I've noticed is that I've never had a writing class before.

It is astonishing to think about how few people have really learned to write a longer organized text.

I think this is something that severely limits organizations and companies, especially in software development. Because software is increasingly complex, and if you are not able to describe it, it is hopeless to keep a sane structure. It is also difficult to on-board new specialist people because they would need to learn from oral history, and this makes learning and committing things into long-term memory much more difficult, which is easy if you have actually readable docs, because you just can look into them again and again.

Of course, you can do tricks to limit unnecessary complexity, methods like, say, abstractinos, or micro-services, or automatic memory management, or defining stable APIs - and you should use them of course!

However, a percentage of problems objectively require complex solutions to solve them. Without writing, it will be difficult to address them, and that puts the organization at a disadvantage against those which do.

Completely agree.

We deal with very complex abstractions everyday and being able to explain them in simple terms is golden. Very rare among us tech workers.

“Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.” - Guindon

(Shamelessly stolen from a Leslie Lamport talk)

I think that's math.

See https://www.2uo.de/Quotations/books-writing/ (the Guindon and two Lamport quotes are linked).

I don't know how to start writing or what to write about. What exercises have helped you?

By being a human you'll constantly think. Write your thoughts down. There you go, you know now what to write about!

On a more serious note, look for anything you are interested at and start to write it. You don't need to be a professional, you can write about it as an amateur and share your journey with others in a blog post or Twitter. Hell, even facebook.

Let's say you want to learn a new programming language. You'll have many thoughts like: hey, this function is pretty neat. This and that. I like this, I don't like that.

Find a clever way of writing those thoughts that is concise and that people would like to read.

If you are too shy and don't feel like sharing your thoughts with anyone, write it for yourself. Imagine if you could open a box with your texts from 1 year ago, with how are you feeling and what you are worried and excited about. I'd bet you would be interested at it. But you don't have it now. So start stacking those texts now for the next year.

As for exercises, there are so many and they will improve your writing in different ways, it's up to you to decide what is important. Find anybody that is inspiring to you and see how they write and communicate.

Also, like any art or subjective matters, writing is all about observing. Our brain has too many things to care about. If you don't make the conscious decision of looking at a text with a observer POV, it will just be yet another text and your brain will only focus on its content, not so much with style.

Editing is important too ;) One effective sentence beats ten well-crafted sentences.

I think you’re reading one of those exercises right now!

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