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Comment by mingus88 | Hacker News Reader

Your mention of novels and emotion is a false equivalence because novels are richly authored, edited and long form.

We have an entire generation of people who grew up on short form text as their primary way to communicate electronically. In many cases they won’t even bother to read even a couple of paragraphs.

In a work setting, all the shorthand slang and emoji/meme based communication is unprofessional and in my experience many people actively remove emotion from their slack messages. We strive to be neutral and objective because slack messages are monitored and forever.

As much as I hate to say it, I am not completely opposed to some form of limited RTO because Zoom and Slack simply are not enough to get context in many environments, even if you are added to every thread and meeting.

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> Your mention of novels and emotion is a false equivalence because novels are richly authored, edited and long form.

It is not a false equivalence but rather a statement that there isn’t anything inherent about text that makes it devoid of emotional quality.

For people who aren’t reading between the lines: we need to get better at writing. My over all point is, in large part, about that. That the denizens of internet who have been around for decades already possess this skill because they have, I would hope, successfully applied it and shipped (in my example) open source software as a distributed text based communication team.

Most people I work with don't have those skilled writing that comes with open source involvement. Things like Release notes, releasing and versioning are often handled in a very sloppy way. They throw over some software or hardware and then they make some calls about how it is supposed to be used, forgetting to communicate all the caveats... Yeah you first need to set that jumper, wait 5 seconds and start the app... kind of communication.

I'd argue that effective written communication is a skill that can be learned and taught, and a best practice that can be enforced, rather than an innate property of a given human being.

If you can write code, you can create documents that include all the necessary details for a handover—without needing to be a brilliant writer—as long as you're aware that you're required to do so.

>In a work setting, all the shorthand slang and emoji/meme based communication is unprofessional

Perhaps that's the problem? Texting pretty much killed phone calls, everybody has learned to communicate over text.

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