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Comment by nichochar | Hacker News Reader

Moving to America from France, one of my biggest surprises was how poor the average engineer (person really, but engineers affect me directly at work) is at summarizing concepts clearly.

I learned a little later that "summary" exercises are not a thing taught in school here, which surprised me. In France, "le résumé" is an exercise that they constantly drill into students (particularly technical ones), in which you take a 3 page paper and condense it into 100 words. I really hated doing it back in the day, but as an adult I now am very grateful I did and wished other countries made this more prevalent.

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Teaching how to write summaries in the US would be a good idea. To make things even worse, in the US most essays are assigned a minimum length so students learn to pad their writing with lots of fluff and circumlocutions.

Purely anecdotal, but I recall plenty of summarizing assignments, along with other reading comprehension tasks in my English classes. Though you're right about the minimum length padding thing reinforcing the opposite skill.

I'm convinced there must be a prescribed US essay structure that mandates describing what you're going to discuss in the essay - it has been poorly translated into the style for youtube videos.

Yes, this is literally the case from grade school all the way into college level technical writing courses. The first paragraph, or first section depending on the length of the work, should essentially be a high level summary of the entire work. I remember in middle school we were also taught to write our paragraphs this way, that is, the first sentence should be a gestalt of the entire paragraph. The conclusion of each paragraph, and also the conclusory paragraph itself, is also supposed to have this behavior to some extent.

It took me quite a few years to realize how dry, boring, and repetitive this makes your writing, and I now choose to write as I talk. Might make for worse documentation, but it's far better for conversing with other people either in real time or in back-and-forths via email.

Say what you're going to say (briefly)

Say it (at length)

Say what you've said (briefly)

Is how you successfully present things in the US

It’s probably part cultural as well because We teach the opposite. We encourage students to be verbose. Longer term papers are rewarded. Your graduate thesis? How about 100 pages.

We also encourage bullshitting in everyday communications. It drives me nuts.

Anecdotally, as someone who got a Master's in English and had to TA and tutor writing at a college level, it's the schools/universities. English departments are being defunded because Business degrees and Engineering degrees make the schools more money and are seen as more "valuable". So most people with a non-liberal arts degree from the states can barely write above a high school level. But it's good enough.

Very interesting perspective! I generally attributed that more to different proficiency levels in English as a second language, rather than language-independent summarization skill, but I guess that's also a realistic option.

We're taught to write book reports until about 6th grade and then we never revisit that skill again. :/

I had to do this for an undergraduate business degree here in the US and it feels like a super power working in software.

In America when we can’t explain something we print more money and redo the solution. Often creating more problems but that’s our flywheel we’re talking about!

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