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Comment by cratermoon | Hacker News Reader

I majored in journalism. I learned how to write clearly and concisely, and do it on short notice, too. I learned a process for writing, which is something most people don't have. I also learned how to ask good questions, and be skeptical about what organizations and people say when their job or profits depend on it.

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Funny, I quit newspaper club because I couldn't tolerate writing articles in that useless newspaper style: irrelevant fact, lede, quote, counterquote, irrelevant speculation end.

It's just a tool in the toolkit.

I dropped my entire comp-sci major when I realized I couldn't bear even the first of two required technical writing courses. It was wringing all of the joy out of something I loved.

Later, newswriting was... maybe not quite "fun", but I did enjoy the challenge of remaining creative within the form while keeping a demanding instructor happy.

Screenwriting was similar. It's not a form I really ~enjoy writing in, but I think learning to write from that perspective also leaves you with something good for the kit.

That seems like a questionable reason to ditch CS to me. Was it really that bad to do the technical writing courses?

Yes, having done all kinds of styles, I can see wanting to avoid technical writing. It's a highly rigid form, with lots of rules about how to arrange information. Sometimes just the tools are enough to make you want to quit: I'm looking at you (La)TeX.

Thanks for questioning my reasons (anonymously).

As such things tend to be, it was the last straw. I was an angry, shy, lonely young person. I didn't know it at the time, but I was 1 year in to 6 years of ~writing-my-way-out of the worst two of those.

I came to school thinking I'd study writing or programming. I started with the one likely to pay more to please my dad, but only found one of the intro CS projects remotely engaging.

Yes; we were sitting in technical writing (second semester) discussing what we'd done for the first assignment and why. Through the lens of the only thing that I really found engaging (and catharctic, and joyful) in high school, I could see that my heart wasn't in it. Any of it.

(I would later return to programming through art projects.)

never heard of this style. afaik the "inverted pyramid" is the commonly-taught method for reporting in journalism schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)

the whole point of this style is to remove all irrelevant information.

Specifically for newspapers. Less so for magazines. Certainly it was followed fairly rigidly for historical wire service journalism because the newspaper using the copy would (literally) cut the article at a more or less arbitrary point to fill a space (between ads) in the paper. Obviously the constraints don't exist in the same way but writing from most important down to least important still makes sense for a lot of reasons.

I was taught to aggressively look for and cut irrelevant facts. Back in the day newspapers and other printed material had space limitations. If your story didn't fit in the allotted column inches, the copy desk would cut it.

I also worked on a copy desk in college. Ideally a story has the most important information up front, in the inverted pyramid style, so that if an editor has to cut it for space, they can just cut from the bottom and not lose the main story. Given the very limited time the copy desk has to look at all the stories before deadline, writers than failed to lead with the key facts would know very quickly that they needed to work on their stories more.

That sounds so valuable. Even for other fields, like the parent commenter said.

I’m in engineering, but I have a growing interest in journalism. I’ve already graduated and here in Norway we don’t really do double degrees or minors anyway.

My main interest will remain engineering, but if I want to scratch that journalism itch some day, I wonder if I should go for a part-time degree, or just try amateur journalism. I think I’d favour the former.

Any videos or online courses that you would recommend?

You learn by doing. Find some online pub (or open source community) that will give you decent editorial support and start writing for them.

Journalism is a very large field with a history going back to the 17th century. Your question is roughly analogous to asking to recommend something about computers.

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