0XReasons to Write and Publish | Hacker News Reader

0XReasons to Write and Publish

fabiensanglard.net

58 pointssigna1113 comments

There are good reasons to write without worrying about publishing at all. One reason is that thinking about what will be 'publishable' will most likely greatly distort what you choose to write about.

Applies to most creative activities. It seems that many highly popular creatives were having great fun being creative, and that their audience shares in that enjoyment.

Of course some people would like to be able to support themselves in that way. But, then, it's probably best to let your audience find you first.

Writing to myself instead of "the world" also increased my writing volume.

Switching the target audience to myself boosted my blogging a lot initially.

Writing gets less complicated when you're writing to someone specific.

Great and short article about the importance of being able to explain something.

Medical students have the phrase

See one, do one, teach one,

when it comes to learning a new treatment or diagnostic method. I like that because it has the repetition baked in and each iteration one needs more depth of understanding.

According to the article it sounds useful to add a fourth one:

Write it down.

In order to make it more easy to relearn the thing if you forget it.

When I spend time studying a topic, I make PowerPoint/keynote slides. They are better than texts for three reasons.

(1) Slides are more concise, forcing me to digest the material into high level sections.

(2) More diagrams and less text provides motivations and intuitions of the subject. They are therefore easier to teach others or at least hook them to learning more.

(3) I am always ready to give a talk on the subject.

(4) Details or technical notes can be put in the back.

This is great! Another thing I do is use index cards, just like slides. I can put them all out on the floor, and see the flow of logic I want to use. For some reason working with physical cards and stepping away from the computer helps me clarify thoughts.

I agree for the most part, but I've decided markdown is the best for this. Plain text is just easier to link, store, query and markdown can be rendered as slides with little to no effort.

Intuitions are better and more concisely communicated through images and spoken word, rather than written text.

If all technical details are necessary to get the big picture across, then I agree one should move to text and equations. But this is rarely the case (I challenge any text to try to compete with a 3blue1brown video).

Most people are too lazy to read a wall of text. They would rather invite a speaker to go through 20 slides and get the big picture.

Technical details in my opinion are overrated, and should be relegated to computers.

Title is misleading, it appears to promise no reasons, which I assume would mean an article full of arguments against. Not as advertised.

The actual title is "0x4 reasons to write and publish", probably it got mangled somehow.

Yes, HN's automated title mangler strikes again.

I complained about this just a couple of days ago on another submission. Dang continues to defend it, and I continue to hate it.

You can still fix the title yourself after your submission. :)

I can't fix the titles. The submitters of the articles can fix the titles, if they notice.

Yes that's what I meant. Edited to clarify the ambiguity in my comment.

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