How to Write Without Writing

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/02/how-to-write-without-writing.html

by DanielRibeiro • 15 years ago

80 26 15 years ago

iwwr• 15 years ago

tl;dr SO is about keeping yourself entertained while you're learning how to write (among other things). But so is HN :)

lysium• 15 years ago

That side effect of posting on SO that you improve your writing is interesting. Never thought about that but it's so true: it's good if you an answer but it's better if you can tell anybody about it such that they understand.

Nice layout of http://writers.stackexchange.com/ !

rimantas• 15 years ago

And someone in the thread about tech interviews was claiming that it's ok if candidate cannot express his thoughts as long as he is a good programmer…

hcho2• 15 years ago

Am I the only one who feels this is blatant and tasteless self promotion?

nollidge• 15 years ago

I think it's absolutely, blatantly self-promoting, but I don't see how it's tasteless.

NickPollard2• 15 years ago

It's certainly self promotion, and fairly blatant I suppose, but what about it strikes you as tasteless?

I think his central point - writing more helps you write better; StackOverflow is an easy and welcoming place to write more - is largely true, and I don't think he should be unable to say it just because it happens to promote his own interests.

hcho2• 15 years ago

His writing about truisms and plugging StackOverflow started to become too frequent for me. I can't help feeling that such posts are only written for their advertisement value. I expect some sincerity from blog posts.

raganwald• 15 years ago

Blatant self-promotion? Yes, but that's not particularly interesting on the web, it's a form of Ad Hominem ("He would say that, because he runs SO"). Here's a variation of the same criticism:

Jeff Atwood says that being a great programmer is not about having technical skill, it's about communicating well. This is clearly an observation born out of narcissistic bias, since he freely admits that he is not a great programmer, and he is much more famous for writing words than code.

tygorius4• 15 years ago

Blatant? Sure. But hardly out of the ordinary when it comes to blogs.

I don't think it's tasteless, but de gustibus non disputandum est, which Phillip K. Dick so eloquently translated as "Those people can have bad taste and I don't care."

zdw• 15 years ago

Improving my writing skill by writing persuasively on blogs, HN, etc. is why I spend time here.

I've always hated writing, from my first english courses. I felt the way it was done, with an overemphasis on creative writing (which is of limited use in many real-world situations, beyond developing technique), and the focus on word count (write me a 3 pager, if it's less your grade goes down) was a detriment to clear, concise, well written and direct communication.

Writing in school should quickly progress past the creative stage after middle school, and focus on technical, nonfiction, and other explanatory methods through high school. It should be split off from literature courses, which would better be combined with philosophy and history.

Similarly, I hated typing classes. I learned to type by telnetting into MUDs and learning it on my own. This was much more fun and less of a grind than typing "cat cat cat dog cat cat" over and over. The downside? I can never use an ergonomic keyboard, as I hit the "b" key with my left index finger.

NickPollard2• 15 years ago

The focus on word count in education is absurd, and I cannot help but feel it contributes to the use of 'business speak' and vague waffling e-mails that workers and customers are subject to every day.

It seems to me that people get it drummed into them that length is proportional to importance. This is not true; the best writing conveys its point simply and elegantly.

"[Writing] is finished not when there's nothing left to add, but when there's nothing left to take away." (paraphrased)

nhebb• 15 years ago

I agree. My daughter, a sophomore in high school, sent me a paper for review before printing. I made her re-write it from scratch. The problem was that the assignment was simple but vague: write a 1-2 page paper on the civil rights movement, At first glance, that assignment description doesn't sound, bad, but 1-2 pages to a high school student can be interpreted as "fill 1-2 pages with words".

I had her pick 3 points she wanted to make, do a little bit of online research on each point to develop a paragraph on two on each, and then add real introduction and conclusion paragraphs.

It's a simple formula that they teach in schools, but they don't reinforce when they give writing assignments. The assignment would have been clearer if the teacher had asked for 3-5 major influences on the civil rights movement. Sometimes you get what you ask for.

The nice thing was that, afterward, my daughter said that this way was a lot easier. BS'ing is hard work! One of the things I've noticed in both school and the workplace is that a lot of people expend more energy trying to avoid work then it would take just to do the work in the first place.

ddbeck• 15 years ago

I think it's unfair to say that the focus on word count is absurd. Like most things, writing well requires practice. The only meaningful metric educators have to determine whether a student has actually practiced is word count. The unfortunate thing about the way writing is taught isn't the emphasis on word count; it's the total neglect of editing.

I received a formal education in technical writing. In college, I probably submitted a peak of 40 thousand words to my professors in a single semester. But I wrote at least double that, in the form of things like notes, outlines, and stuff discarded as inadequate or unnecessary. That was the chief thing I learned: not to write less, but to discard more.

One of my favorite adages about writing is a good complement to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's quote. It's Sturgeon's Law: "Ninety percent of everything is crud." To get ten good words, you're going to have to write 100. I don't think it's a bad idea to teach that to kids, so long as they're taught to throw away the other 90.

_delirium• 15 years ago

HN is useful for this too. My particular niche is that I'm an academic researcher, but I think there's a bunch of stuff that's poorly presented in academic papers, or at least only presented in a way that's intended to be read by other people in the same field (or sub-field, or sub-sub-field). So one of my medium-term plans is to re-present some of the stuff I like in a less jargony and formal way, in tutorials / blog posts / whatever. But often that gets pushed off behind other obligations, and it feels like Work, even if it's work that I enjoy. But posting an explanation of something I know about that comes up in a discussion on HN just feels like conversation, much more natural. It's not always as polished as a result, but sometimes I've actually used my HN comments as a first-draft of a longer tutorial.

For example (for a bit of self-promotion), this recent comment possibly could've been a better-written and better-edited blog post, with some images and examples, and a title like "implicit and explicit models in interactive fiction", or I dunno, something like that but catchier: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2177226. But writing something like that would probably sit on the TODO list for a long time; meanwhile I just banged out that comment in 20 minutes or so because it came up in discussion. The fact that it was "replying to a comment" rather than "writing a thing" somehow tricked it into not feeling like writing. Now if I ever want to write a blog post, I have a draft of the idea written out.

jonpaul• 15 years ago

I completely agree. I made a comment yesterday about my observations on hiring at Google. I realized that there was some kind of bias on my side regarding my observations, I kept thinking about "survivor bias" but I knew that wasn't quite correct. Finally someone chimed in with calling me out on a classic case of "observation bias." Just what I was looking for. I won't forget that next time.

I think the fundamental point of the article is correct. Just write. Do it anywhere, and you'll get better. No finer than here at HN :p

jerf• 15 years ago

"HN is useful for this too."

Many people wonder what the point of participating on HN is. This is my primary reason for doing it here. Being able to write something that survives here is a valuable skill to keep in practice; being able to do it when it against the groupthink even moreso, which I get to practice sometimes.

(I write because I must, but I could find much easier places to do it than here. I do keep a blog but that's for different things.)

stevie_wilks• 15 years ago

I think one of the points that was glossed over in the conclusion of the article is that writing with feedback is much more valuable than without it.

The author of the letter to Jeff made this very clear that the up and down votes and whether or not the answer was accepted was feedback on his/her writing and it made them better.

Authors of books have editors to make the author (and the book) better, blogs have commenters which make the blogger better, SO answers have commenters and votes to make the participants better.

So DO just go out there and write yes; but also try to get feedback for your writing because it will multiply the amount you learn by writing.

DanielBMarkham• 15 years ago

Oddly enough, I read this and came away without capturing anything of value from it.

Write more. Thanks. Already knew that.

I hate to sound snarky, but it's very ironic -- this entire post had the feeling of somebody sitting down to make themselves write something, anything -- without developing much original thought. In fact he quotes his cofounder quite a bit instead of coming up with insights of his own. He mixed together two very subjective ideas, "what makes good programmers" and "what makes good writers" in a way that didn't manage to shed light on either one. At least to me.

Communication is important, yes. Am I missing something? Was there something else?

Like I said, not trying to attack the writer, and I apologize if my tone is harsh. I know many times I have to write things over and over again, coming at the same topic from multiple angles, before I really nail it. Perhaps this is what's going on. (In which case I begin to wonder why it got so many votes)

recoiledsnake2• 15 years ago

I guess the main takeaway is that programmers like to ask questions and answers on StackOverflow because it's very helpful and popular. Even through newsgroups and other forums existed previously, StackOverflow is taking it to new heights by making it easier to ask questions and get answers.

Also, the site admins have cultivated a peer pressure of having answers/questions in good English on the site forcing people to sit down and formulate their typing instead of bashing the keyboard like it happens on other programmer forums. This is similar in effect to the editorial guidelines on HN, the same link on Reddit gets a very flamebaity headline whereas it's pretty tame on HN because of peer pressure.

tygorius4• 15 years ago

I think you're missing the importance of feedback, in particular the points of speed and quality. Writing more doesn't help if you're just repeating the same mistakes over and over.

In the traditional writer's workshop, you write something, it's passed around, and people make comments. Depending on the workshop, a good portion of the feedback can be useless. And it's quite possible that few or even none of the others are trying to write the same sort of thing as you, so you don't have a good source of contrastive examples.

Read the SO response he got again. Near instant feedback, from a peer group, with counter examples to show what worked with the readers and what didn't. Faster, better quality feedback that leads to accelerated improvement.

steveklabnik• 15 years ago

One portion of my application to grad school (in English Composition) explained how my participation in /., Digg, Reddit, and Hacker News (among others) got me into the habit of daily writing. It's probably the largest factor in my ability to write.

ajg1977• 15 years ago

It's ironic that Jeff espouses the benefits of writing, yet nearly all of his blog posts are simply brief snippets of text that link together larger paragraphs written by others.

Almost every time I visit his blog I come away wondering what exactly he added to the conversation.

tygorius4• 15 years ago

Call me crazy, but I strongly suspect that the feedback system virtues that helped Stack Overflow contributors develop their writing skills will not manifest on writers.stackexchange.com.

Many writing queries fall into the taste or reference citation categories, which aren't amenable to the correctness criteria of SO. Not to mention that there are already plenty of writing resources on the Web, so I'm skeptical of the new launch being able to distinguish itself.

How to Write Without Writing

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