Ask HN: Am I the only one hurt by lack of writing skills?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34027872

by salva101 • 4 years ago

18 54 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

As I've been advancing in my career, I've realized that my writing skills are pretty terrible. This has become even more obvious as I've been trying to become a staff engineer, since I have to write more emails, communicate more, connect teams, talk to higher level managers, influence people, and deal with office politics.

I've tried a few apps to help with my writing, like Grammarly, but I find that their suggestions are usually pretty minor and don't really help with the overall structure or clarity of my messages.

I've seen a few similar posts here and it seems like this is a common issue, especially for non-native speakers like me.

So, in the last couple of months, I've been working on this AI-powered app that can fix my grammar and give me better suggestions for improving my writing.

Aaand… I’m here to validate it! What do you think? Is this a good idea to pursue? Would you be interested in paying for something like this? I'm open to any feedback or criticism.

Note: The above text was reviewed and adjusted with my app.

dtagames2• 4 years ago

It's possible that a tool could help you improve an individual piece of writing. Even ChatGPT can probably do that. But you probably would like to improve your ability overall, rather than just fix some writing you've already done.

To achieve that will probably take a human being looking at examples of your writing and telling you what went wrong. Usually, there is some kind of mistake you will be making again and again. If it's a grammar problem, you need to have someone teach you the rules in way that you can apply consistently to every new sentence. And I don't mean all the rules because obviously you know lots of them. But you probably need a human to hammer in the ones that you're having problems with.

Even more likely than grammar is that you might be having problems conveying your meaning in a concise and compelling way. This is an art as much as a science and will also probably take human tutoring to improve. I love writing[0] myself and I'm elated to see that you want to improve. If it would be of help to you, contact me at the info in my profile and I'd be happy to read a few of your things and spend some time on a Zoom call helping you out, gratis.

[0] https://medium.com/@mimixco

salva10112• 4 years ago

Oh wow! Thank you so much for the offer. Will be reaching out for sure! I just posted in one of the above threads my original input (here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34034355) -- I'd love to have your review there!

dtagames2• 4 years ago

Happy to do it. Email me and we'll setup a Zoom call. It's easier to give this kind of feedback face-to-face rather than to write it. :-)

PaulHoule• 4 years ago

When you ask employers what they think is lacking in education the first thing they say is writing skills.

To evaluate your app we have to see how it performs. We know people benefit from spelling checking and systems like grammarly, if you can make something that is better enough than you can replace those things.

If you aren’t ready to put it up for a public demo I suggest you make a video demo.

kypro• 4 years ago

I struggle more with verbal communication, but I struggle with text too.

For structure a hack I've found is to write things out as verbosely as I can, then cut words and sentence that add little to no value.

When I do that I tend to end up with something that doesn't sound rambley while still fully conveying what I'm trying to say.

In terms of style though I have no tips. I find my writing tends to be very dry, but I'm uninteresting and monotone when I speak (autism), so maybe that's just a reflection of my personality.

zcw100• 4 years ago

It's interesting that your solution to the problem was spending your time writing an app rather than working on your writing skills. That may be some of your problem right there. You don't actually value it. You've no doubt improved your coding skills with no improvement in your writing skills.

It might help to look at it in reverse to see the problem with your approach. Imagine someone with a degree in journalism saying, "I need to improve my coding skills" and going out and writing a blog post about coding instead of doing any actual coding.

rgaino• 4 years ago

This. Read fiction, read good writers, write articles, read what you write, edit before submitting. Don't code an app.

antegamisou• 4 years ago

Since you aren't a native speaker, I believe some degree of imperfection in speech and writing is acceptable especially if the people you're working with are aware of this.

That is not to say you should remain stagnant and not try to improve though.

Many have suggested you take up some form of writing to improve but IME reading high-quality text (newspaper articles, classic literature books) is a more efficient way that will help you imitate the caliber of native speakers in the long term.

xena• 4 years ago

Write some longer articles. Start with a single sentence that says what you want people to learn. Then turn that into a set of bullet points that explains the steps involved from the background to the problem all the way to how it's solved and why you think that is a reasonable solution. Then just add details and turn the bullet tree into paragraphs.

This should help you get better at writing. Writing was my weakest subject in school.

riwsky• 4 years ago

Read “On Writing Well”, by William Zinsser. Journalism schools often assign it to first-years. I speak English natively, and have no trouble with grammar. It still made me better at my job.

---

Would not be interested in paying for the app. Current models summarize well, and can rewrite for tone too. But clear technical communication requires understanding the underlying logic, which LLMs haven’t quite cracked yet.

marcusverus• 4 years ago

This should absolutely be the first stop for anyone who wants to improve their writing. Just don't get bogged down in the more narrowly-focused chapters, like Chapter 13: Writing About Places: The Travel Article.

Another helpful book is A Rulebook for Arguments by Anthony Weston. It focuses more on the organization of your thoughts before you start writing. When writing about more complex topics, I frequently find myself discovering what I want to say as I'm writing, which makes for a lot of re-organizing and re-writing and wasted time. By slapping together an outline of what I want to write before I get started, I can identify what I want to say--and the optimal order in which to say it--before putting pen to paper.

phphphphp• 4 years ago

Writing is a form of communication, communication is the exchange of information: good information communicated badly is more valuable than bad information communicated well. Structure and clarity are inputs as much as they are outputs: focus on the input, and the output will improve. The challenge for output-massagers is that grammatical and phrasing improvements are marginal. My writing isn't great (I'm using colons in this message without any confidence that they belong there) but by focusing on the important information, I am able to communicate well in a professional setting.

My ideal tool is one that focuses on the input, rather than the output. A tool that accepts input as the units of information I want to communicate, priority ordered and linked by relationships, and the tool turns that into a narrative journey for humans to enjoy. I don't want a tool to tell me my colon should be a comma, or my phrasing is redundant, I want a tool to output the best written way to communicate information for the audience.

ctrwu2843• 4 years ago

Spelling and grammar is secondary to good communication.

I would say you (or your app) have a ways to go yet.

This post is actually about validating a business idea, but that portion of the post is pretty much a byline.

A computer is never going to read your mind and understand the idea(s) you are trying to convey. (Caveat "640k is enough for anybody...")

I am not convinced your problem is language/spelling/grammar. You are reducing communication to a protocol when it is so much more.

torh• 4 years ago

This post is actually about validating a business idea

This message would be lost in a busy business world, which again suggest that the AI doesn't work and the problem lies elsewhere. My experience is as follows: open with the most important part first, then continue with the why. Almost nobody has time to read the finer print in the bottom of an email.

Oj7472• 4 years ago

Jow can I can

timnetworks• 4 years ago

Can you post the original to compare against? I read through this while thinking 'grammar seems fine, doubly so for a non-native english speaker' until the last sentence.

salva10112• 4 years ago

Sure, thanks for the interest. Here's the original:

"As I advance my career, I find my writing skills horrible. I started feeling the pain even more as an aspiring staff engineer.

Now I need to write way more emails, communicate more, connect teams, engage with higher level managers, influence people, play politics etc.

Since feeling this pain, I tried a few apps, and my last one was Grammarly. I've found their suggestions to be very minor. I was looking for a solution that can check entire message correctness, clearity and suggest ways to improve the overall structure.

Searching for this problem, I found a few similar posts here and it seems like it is a shared concern, especially for the non native speakers like me. Which brought me to this experiment of writing an app powered by AI that can correct my grammar and improve suggestions.

What do you all think? Is it a valid idea? Would you pay to have access to this tool? Please give me your feedback and let’s debate. Don't go easy on me, critics are all I'm asking."

Curious to hear your feedback about the result from the above original input. AI response gave me pretty much the final version of my post, I think I just inserted this: "Aaand… I’m here to validate it!" and the footprint "Note:". And by the last sentence do you mean the note? (Could you please state how a native speaker would write it?)

Oj7472• 4 years ago

I mine how can I hack

toddm• 4 years ago

In my opinion, you should not be using AI or apps or anything other than a text editor and TeX/LaTeX to advance your skills here.

My suggestion is to assign to yourself a research topic and write a paper just as you would if submitting it to a refereed journal. Pick something you already know about (or know a lot about).

I am biased - I have a strong academic background and published journal articles, meeting abstracts, and the like - but the outline of title, abstract, introduction, methods, results, analysis, and conclusions provides structure and will help guide you through the process. If you want to be surgical about it, include citations and a bibliography.

What happens next? Find a "reviewer" and tell them to red-ink the hell out of your paper. Make the edits and resubmit it until the reviewer is happy. If you can, gently impose on a friend/coworker who in your estimation is a good writer and has better writing skills than you do. This might cost you a few coffees/beers/pizzas but it will be worth it.

salva10112• 4 years ago

Thank you so much, I really appreciate your feedback and I love your suggestions! I'm super optimistic that we are not far away from having that “reviewer friend” just being an AI. It will do exactly what that friend is supposed to: red-ink the hell out of your paper.

thenerdhead2• 4 years ago

Engineers will do anything but the most obvious thing to solve their problems. AI isn’t going to help you become a better writer, it is going to make your writing better. Those are two different things.

imiric• 4 years ago

Does it ultimately matter? The goal is to improve text communication with other humans, so whether that's accomplished by human or AI skills is not really important. We've used technology in all aspects to improve our quality of life, and this is another extension of that.

I think it's great OP decided to build a product to help them with this. It shows two great programmer virtues: impatience and laziness. And by posting it here, they can certainly bask in a bit of hubris as well. :)

bobbylarrybobby• 4 years ago

Writing is so much more than grammar. Focusing on grammar to improve your writing is like focusing on your editor config to become a better coder.

salva10112• 4 years ago

People using GitHub Copilot are learning how to code while they review and tweak the AI suggestions. As an outcome, they are becoming better coders in the process.

Don't you agree?

flashgordon4• 4 years ago

Hmm if i was to make an argument to "disagree" which I feel reasonably compelled to do - using GitHub copilot to generate (somewhat working) code and reviewing it is akin to watching videos about learning to play the violin. Great for familiarity and knowing where to find said videos, terrible for competence, mastery or originality!

thenerdhead2• 4 years ago

At this time, I would not agree. That's because AI is literally knocking at the door for many use-cases and we haven't evolved with it yet(especially education). That will likely take another decade at this rate.

I believe the same reliance on Stack Overflow or Google for the most basic answers make people lazy and more impatient. This cheats people out of the process where you typically have these insights for wisdom. The AI also will not get "better" because it's capped at our collective understanding. Which fewer and fewer people will even contribute towards due to new AI-assisted habits.

Only time will tell if it makes people "better". There's no doubt it will be helpful and useful in many settings, especially in education. But this over-reliance makes you only as good as your tool. Which is what my original comment was trying to say.

amarant• 4 years ago

Lots of criticism here about the approach, but I rather like it! I think if you can execute well on this app, it'll be a huge hit! It might be a shortcut to good writing, but who doesn't like a shortcut? Also I do believe that if you produce good writing with the help of an app, sooner or later you'll pick up on the little tricks your app frequently suggest, and you'll learn and actually become a better writer!

Actually I think it might be the best way to learn, because it'll teach you to write well in contexts that are relevant to you. Someone suggested reading fiction from good authors, but that'll teach you to write good fiction, not engineering emails. The skills might be transferable to some degree, since it is rather similar, but it's not the same thing!

Kudos on this idea, and I'd definitely pay for it if it works well enough!

salva10112• 4 years ago

Thank you for the support! I really appreciate it!

OTOH, I understand the criticism too. Maybe I was not clear in my message, but of course the idea is not replace 100% of a person's writing with a generated AI blurb.

But more like an assistant, where the user can see more ways that the message can be expressed more fluidly and adapt as needed. And BIG YES, hopefully, by using the app, seeing suggestions repeatedly, practicing more, learning more and becoming a better writer in the process!

iancmceachern• 4 years ago

Skip the apps, get "The Elements of Style" the physical book.

salva10112• 4 years ago

Thanks for the recommendation, it's definitely on my list!

gardenhedge• 4 years ago

This is a Show HN disguised as an "Ask HN".

I can't see the market for this, especially with ChatGPT, but then again.. Grammerly exists.

przeor• 4 years ago

Jasper AI is alteady AI copywriting assistant.

Why you want to make another tool? How it's different?

salva10112• 4 years ago

I think the shift here is that the focus is not copywriting. The tool would be for all types of writing, not specifically for marketers.

rchaud• 4 years ago

You can improve your communication skills indirectly by brushing up your organization skills. No AI app needed.

For written communications, you can keep it short and point people's attention to a linked issue ticket, or a shared doc with the technical requirements. It is OK to keep emails short and let the recipient follow up if they have questions.

I find that communicating is a lot easier if both sides are on the same page more or less on what needs to be done. That's where organized documentation can help.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 4 years ago

Have you tried writing and reading books first?

AndyMcConachie• 4 years ago

The only way to get better at writing is to write more. Reading also helps, but you need to read good writing.

I do more writing English these days than I do writing code and I'm here to say that writing is labor, just like coding is labor. The more you do it, the better you get. There are no shortcuts.

salva10112• 4 years ago

I envision a tool that can make people more agile and learn things as they go. Do you see GitHub copilot as a shortcut? Because the idea is the same.

lokar• 4 years ago

IME most engineers < staff tend to have trouble “thinking clearly” vs writing well. Writing can always be improved, but you must start by understanding what you want to say and why.

progrus• 4 years ago

If you review and reflect on the output, and if you are consistent with that work, the new tools will indeed help you become a better writer. Good for you!

Steuard• 4 years ago

In case it matters to you, the "GPT-2 Output Detector" rates this text as "99.68% Fake". (https://huggingface.co/openai-detector/) For comparison, the top three comments as of this writing got scores of 87%, 99.91%, and 99.98% Real.

I wouldn't be surprised if, within a few months or years, we all develop a reasonably solid ability to recognize AI generated text (in much the same way that the special effects that looked great in movies 30 years ago look pretty goofy today). But it seems that even before we reach that point, AI is already pretty good at recognizing its own.

yawboakye• 4 years ago

acquire taste my dear friend, acquire a taste of what good writing feels like. then try to produce texts that excites those palates. with the acquired taste as a faithful guide, it’s usually easy to tell when you hit or miss the mark.

2devnull• 4 years ago

People like writing that is easy to read, not writing that is good. Newer generations don’t even read books. Try to write down, not up. Shakespeare was great. Nobody reads Shakespeare and if he wrote today people would tell him to knock it off, use the active voice, shorter sentences, more couplets.

vple• 4 years ago

I think good writing is more about the higher level: effectively communicating a point. Mechanical components, such as grammar, are important but don't help express ideas.

As a tangent, I think a lot of the soft influence you mention requires effective communication, not effective writing. In my experience, it's important to understand the context and information that others are working under/with, and to make sure that relevant information makes its way to people who need it.

okennedy• 4 years ago

Writing, especially when the intent is to transmit an idea, is a lot like writing code: (i) Make absolutely sure that you know what your goal is (and why it's your goal). (ii) Before you use a term or concept that the reader might not know, make sure you've defined it. (iii) Make sure to state your assumptions.

Like programming, start with the main argument (API) and then work your way backwards: What doesn't the reader know or agree with? What fact/claim would convince them? Why should they believe it? Repeat recursively as needed.

Finally, I have a list of 'weasel words': "this", "that", "it", "these", "them". Words like 'these' are referential, and it's really easy to use 'them' without actually referencing anything (uninitialized pointers?). If you see 'this' in your writing, force yourself to replace 'it' with few words summarizing the referential target.

el_don_almighty• 4 years ago

Engineers who can't write work for those who can.

With AI reaching an acceptable level of mass acceptance (i.e. mediocrity), many writers for news media and the entertainment industry exist on an eroding edge of economic desperation.

Superior communication skills now stand as a critical hallmark of success for the future.

This may not necessarily mean traditional authoring skills as your app so deftly demonstrates, but crafting well-reasoned messages into a compelling narrative that works within a logical construct while eliciting emotional engagement still requires work and artistry worthy of your effort.

The tears of your unborn children stop falling with every sentence wrought from furnace of your heart and finely hammered on the tempest anvil of collaboration.

Work on your writing you wretched slave and free your mind.

flashgordon4• 4 years ago

Btw i am scared and curious to see what your post was like before your app reviewed it. As an engineer who hated writing and subsequently had terrible written communication skills, I found very little substitute for boring, hard and dreadful practice. "Writing tool" - the green book - was a life saver. Only better alternative was reviews by friends who were expert writers who understood and internalized the tips. I'd like to see that training data in an AI!

salva10112• 4 years ago

Sure! I just posted in one of the threads below, check it out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34034355

flashgordon4• 4 years ago

By the way - to see progress in this area, if your AI can analyse my writing along the "tips" detailed in this book (and explaining my writing weaknesses and suggesting how I can improve in those axes) I think it would invaluable!

https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Tools-Essential-Strategies-Wr...

jareklupinski• 4 years ago

They say that it's 10% what you say, and 90% how you say it.

That said, if what you have to say is worth 10x more than the mean, then you can say it however you want...

I also use https://hemingwayapp.com/ for the _really_ important emails ;)

romanshrompsky• 4 years ago

I have been writing corporate emails for years.

What I do struggle with, is writing down ideas and associated arguments. I struggle a lot trying to write a blogpost and set down in writing my thoughts, for example.

And I think sometimes, you need to fight fire with fire. Practice, practice, practice. And read how others write, too. Spend some time, on your own, without an AI or any form of assistance, to write down something. Push yourself. You won't be happy about it, just like I hate reading what I write, especially when I read what others write on the same topic, but I believe that, with time, it'll help.

Ask HN: Am I the only one hurt by lack of writing skills?

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