Comment by euphemize | Hacker News Reader

Comment by euphemize | Hacker News Reader

Thoroughly agreed. As a developer who spent a lot of time studying humanities, arts and other disciplines requiring constant writing for grant submissions, essays, etc. a lot of skills required to be a good developer become invaluable for a dissertation and the other way around.

  >  A core skill in both disciplines is an ability to think clearly. The best software engineers are great writers because their prose is as logical and elegant as their code.

Personally, I found that combing through my text again and again and again to cut down on unnecessary words, combining similar ideas ideas and clarifying points made a huge difference, and was very much akin to optimizing software. It was generally something other students didn't really bother to do and their writing greatly suffered from it.

I recently worked as an expert witness and had to write a report, I haven't written anything since University ~15 years ago. Writing a technically accurate report about source code for a non-technical audience was amazingly difficult. It was fun, but stressful. Each sentence has to be able to withstand a cross examination, sometimes it took hours to write a single sentence.

I'd do it again, and I recommend anybody that gets the change to do it as well.

> Personally, I found that combing through my text again and again and again to cut down on unnecessary words, combining similar ideas ideas and clarifying points made a huge difference, and was very much akin to optimizing software.

I learned these optimization techniques later in my grad school studies (a very critical adviser helped), never learning how to really write as a CS undergrad. Now I am the go-to guy for paper editing, and I find it frustrating that I can't seem to teach this to those I help write papers.

> combining similar ideas ideas

I can't decide if that was deliberate or not.

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