How to Write Clearly, Think Clearly, and Learn Easily

http://www.ai.uga.edu/mc/WriteThinkLearn.htm

by ZLOB-o-ZLOB • 17 years ago

241 110 17 years ago

ai.uga.edu

physcab• 17 years ago

"If you can't figure out how to organize your material, try this: Write down ideas in random order, then sort them".

I wish they taught me to do this before the 5-paragraph essay format. The latter of which is a useless exercise that has almost no application in real-life writing.

kalid• 17 years ago

The 5-paragraph essay with the self-similar structure (first sentence is an introduction, body sentences have the meat, final sentence is a conclusion) leads to incredibly rigid and repetitive essays. I too wish it was more well-known that this was the most basic, paint-by-numbers way to make an essay, and not the pinnacle of writing style.

incomethax• 17 years ago

It took me years to unlearn the 5 paragraph format. I actually wish that I had been thrown into the deep end and taught to write from reading actual quality essayists like Thoreau.

A part of me feels sad that the American schooling system relies so heavily on sub-par standards to teach the basics.

darkxanthos3• 17 years ago

The 5-paragraph essay isn't meant to be the end all be all but a starting point on writing your thoughts down in a cohesive manner.

Even the great essayists (MLK Jr. for one) followed this to a degree. Introduce your point, support your point, tie it all together and conclude.

You learn it in what? Like 5th grade or Jr. High? Why would it be the pinnacle of real-life adult writing? But that very simplistic structure is the basis for much more complicated essay formats that you learn about in college (Compare & contrast, cause and effect, argumentative, etc.).

tsally3• 17 years ago

The 5-paragraph essay is often the last essay format one learns seriously. We spend the most time teaching it and no other essay format even comes close. A one semester writing course freshmen year in college does not count.

Also, just because some people can run well with 10 pound weights strapped to each leg doesn't mean it's a good idea to run with weights strapped to your legs. I've seen great 5-paragraph essays, but then again, I've also seen some great Visual Basic programs as well. These things serve as great starting points, but it is important to progress beyond them as you become more educated.

monos• 17 years ago

me european, had to look up 5-paragraphs essay in wikipedia.

i've heard the basic "introduction, narration, .." - structure in school, but it sounds to me when you say 5para essay you really mean an essay with five paragraphs.

wallflower• 17 years ago

Nice introduction to Epistemology, a thinking process that I've applied before but did not know had a formal name:

> Really important point (from Sir Karl Popper)

A belief isn't warranted unless you could have known if it's not true.

(1) Your guesses and opinions have to be testable.

(2) It's your job to test your opinions against evidence.

You should always be looking for evidence that your current beliefs are not correct.

> A student who is only good at one subject is often someone who has only one learning strategy.

"Ask HN: What are your (non-hn-related) hobbies?"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=862139

idlewords• 17 years ago

How to Self-Undermine Effectively:

* Link to an oversize PDF of your PowerPoint presentation

* Present idea salad in bullet point format

* Use italics and bold to give your argument "turbo boost"

Actual quote: "Instead of doing what’s easy for you, do what’s easy for your reader."

ScottWhigham2• 17 years ago

I know you think you are being clever but you aren't. It was a well written PowerPoint that was saved as a PDF. So what?

I get so sick of some of the posts on HN by people who seemingly live to save something negative about anything.

StrawberryFrog• 17 years ago

Actual quote: "Instead of doing what’s easy for you, do what’s easy for your reader."

But that actual quote is an important point, expressed in few words: many inexperienced writers are "in love with the sound of their own voice" and forget to put themselves in the position of the reader.

thorax• 17 years ago

I use the carefully/comically pronounce words trick for better spelling, it really does help.

For example, to remember the spelling of Wednesday, I have always pronounced it in my head as "Wedness day".

swombat5• 17 years ago

Having learned English as a second language, I actually pronounced it "Wedness day" for some time before finding out how it was supposed to be pronounced... I think. That was a while ago.

Perhaps that's why many foreigners write much better English than natives: they don't get to find out the pronunciation before they see the word in writing.

frig3• 17 years ago

There's probably a deep insight for AI to be had by whoever discovers why verbose, repetitive writing is easier and more "natural" than taut, clear prose (which is "unnatural" insofar as it is rare and hard to achieve).

Not some folk-theory or heuristic, but actually understanding the mechanism.

jerf• 17 years ago

You dislike verbose, repetitive writing because its information content is low. Taut, clear prose has high information content. The taut, clear prose you are talking about is usually higher in total content than masses of verbose, repetitive writing, despite the quantity of words. I mean "information" in the information theoretic sense, especially in the semi-informal "extent to which the words are a surprise" sense (which I find the most useful formulation for measuring English text, though note there's a relative component to that definition).

It is not surprising that more effort is required to create more information. I don't see where we need a new theory here.

frig3• 17 years ago

I wasn't clear or you're blurring information content and density and thereby missing my point (!). Consider:

- VERBOSE: “One of the best things you can do for yourself to improve your writing is to learn how to cut out words that are not necessary.”

- TAUT: “To improve your writing, cut out unnecessary words.”

In at least the senses I care about I don't see any information in TAUT absent from VERBOSE; if you see any such information TAUT please do point it out.

Which is what I was getting at: TAUT prose communicates identical thoughts with fewer words; why is it so difficult and unnatural to generate?

I find this curious. I now have some suspicions but nothing extremely well-formed.

(!) You'd be right that in the context of essays-for-school the target wordcount is predetermined and information is expensive so the lazy satisfy the requirement(s) with the verbal equivalent of double-spacing + jumbo font.

anonymousDan2• 17 years ago

But it's not necessarily true that if "verbose repetitive writing", has less information content than "taut clear prose". They could have the same information content, just the former has used more bits to describe the same information (i.e. is less compressed). I guess his question is why some people naturally produce the former and not the latter. Perhaps they just haven't performed the necessary computation required to compress the information while they were learning it, i.e. compression could either take place while they are storing the information in memory, or else during the editing process.

TrevorJ• 17 years ago

Less verbose and more information rich writing requires a more nuanced and deeper command of the language. Think of it like a compression algorithm. Algorithms that can encapsulate more information in a smaller file size are much more complex than less information-efficient algorithms.

derefr• 17 years ago

I enjoyed this overall, but I just want to point out that he didn't really make an argument against moral relativism, just said "practically, that's dumb." Most moral relativists [that I know] aren't so concerned with practice—they're instead trying to explicate that human sentient culture is just one possible variety of sentience in the universe. For example: if we could make exact copies of ourselves (incl. knowledge et all), would that be a good idea? Well, we have one moral viewpoint; the people we will be when we need to answer that question, though, will have different cultural biases—that is to say, context—than us. The universe has as many definitions of "good" or "bad" within it as there are ways to compose a utility function.

crucini• 17 years ago

> If your writing is nonsense, maybe your thoughts are nonsense too!

I was in a meeting at VeryBigCompany where someone presented a PRD for review. A large Word document, projected. In theory this is a high leverage document; getting things right would make life easier downstream.

I noticed a few spelling errors, and gently pointed them out. I was ignored. Unwisely, no doubt, I sharpened my voice a bit and repeated the comment. The author recorded my comment with the air of someone humoring a small child.

Next I noticed grammatical errors. Some sentences had two plausible meanings; some had none.

To the other participants, the important thing was that the PRD touched on the key concepts. My focus on minutiae was inappropriate.

But to me, the flaws in expression signified flaws in thinking. I think Covington was right in this case, and the thoughts were nonsense too.

abalashov3• 17 years ago

Strongly agreed. I encounter this reaction a lot when I do the same. Definitely with you.

swombat5• 17 years ago

I used to think like you, until I started working with some brilliant people who can't spell, or produce grammatically correct writing, to save their life. Be careful with that indicator... it's far from a surefire signal.

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

That is so true. My partner in business is a lady that is dyslexic, but extremely smart. If I would be distracted by her spelling I'd miss the good stuff in the message

It's very important to remember that language is a tool for communicating ideas, if you focus on the language as the 'end' you are forgetting it is only a 'means'.

tedunangst• 17 years ago

Even brilliant people can use a spell checker. And if you are presenting at any sort of formal meeting, wouldn't it be a good idea to show your presentation to someone before the main event?

The fact that you can't spell doesn't mean you're stupid. The fact that you are unable to find a way to correct your spelling does.

russell• 17 years ago

Does anyone have a good tool for jotting down ideas and rearranging them? I find that word processors are not very good for this, because they are more concerned with formatting than manipulating units of text. Simplicity is paramount.

ScottWhigham2• 17 years ago

*nix, Mac, or Windows? For Windows, I use OneNote.

algorias4• 17 years ago

A plain text editor works for me. Copy to a word processor (or e-mail, etc) only when you get to the formatting phase.

jefffoster• 17 years ago

I like emacs org-mode. You can create a hierarchy very easy and shuffle items about between the nodes.

omouse• 17 years ago

However some things don't fit nicely into a hierarchy. Remember mode helps with that I think

dstorrs• 17 years ago

http://orgmode.org/

Org-mode in Emacs is brilliant for this. Write things as outlines, shift sub-trees around trivially, fold (hide) and un-fold (reveal) subtrees, embed links within your outline, export to text or HTML when needed.

weaksauce• 17 years ago

If you don't know emacs and you already have Word you could use the outline mode of it. I have used it in the past and it works pretty well. I haven't sat down and learned emacs so I have yet to try org-mode but I hear that works well too.

I have yet to find a truly great outlining program yet. (Note: I plan on learning org-mode emacs but I am a vim guy so the initial inertia of learning it is high.)

eas• 17 years ago

Scrivener (for the Mac) is one you might try. PersonalBrain (multi-platform) might also do the trick.

Emore• 17 years ago

Apple's iWork Pages has a fairly good outlining mode since version 09.

cpach• 17 years ago

How about post-it notes or index cards?

ams61102• 17 years ago

If you use a Mac, Omni Outliner (http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnioutliner/) is pretty good.

wingo• 17 years ago

I prefer the old-fashioned way, with an actual notebook. A good quality notebook makes things more pleasant.

I rearrange things by writing them down again (in the new order). This also helps to refresh the memory.

anonymousDan2• 17 years ago

I find his views on learning from text books vs reading literature interesting. The problem I have with this self directed kind of learning is that sooner or later I always get stuck and have no one to ask questions to. For example, I'm currently going through this book on neural networks that someone posted last week (http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/rojas/neural/). However, when I get to the exercises at the end of the chapter, I inevitably fail to complete some of them. Most of the time I don't even want the answer, since that defeats the purpose, but some kind of hint to get me going in the right direction would be really useful. It would be perfect if you could just ask someone who knows the area. Anyone doing a lot of self directed learning from text books with suggestions?

tgittos• 17 years ago

I spend a lot of my free time doing self directed learning from text books and frequently hit a wall where I don't know where to even begin.

Usually I recognise this as either an incomplete understanding of the topic, or a representation of the problem that I'm not familiar with.

When this happens, I usually make a note of the question or topic, and specific questions I have that are preventing me from understanding the problem, and I seek out different sources of similar knowledge. I find different authors present ideas and concepts in different ways, and sometimes if a concept isn't clear in one text, it's clear in another.

In your specific example, I'd recommend seeking another book or article on neural networks and skim it until you find information on the concept you're stuck with, and see if it can add any pieces to the puzzle. If that fails, sometimes just forgetting about it and proceeding will unlock understanding at random later on, usually in the shower in my case.

algorias4• 17 years ago

"Fact 2: Nonetheless, the world is objectively real."

I really disliked how the author randomly throws in opinions and beliefs like that in a context that didn't really warrant it. I thought I was going to read about epistemology; instead I got a summary of his worldview.

greyman• 17 years ago

You nailed it. I'd like to challenge him to apply the Rule "(1) Your guesses and opinions have to be testable." I am just curious to see how he would test this guess (or opinion), and how did he promoted it as "fact".

papersmith• 17 years ago

I don't see how it's promoted as fact. He presented it as "Popper’s principle". I see it more as a general rule of thumb.

Have to in this case is confined to context of the principle itself, it indicates that you have to do such and such in order to follow the principle.

tsally3• 17 years ago

Yup. Another gem in his worldview:

A learning strategy for history or literature: Subjective judgment is important; careful reasoning is not.

Really, careful reasoning is not required? This is patently false, and probably based on his English and History experiences in high school decades ago. I find that people who say such things rarely have adequate exposure to the subject area. Someone I encounter on a daily basis actually in the CS research community.

abstractwater2• 17 years ago

I wouldn't be so harsh. Yes, his choice of words could have been better. But it's obvious that to exert relevant subjective judgment you need careful reasoning. I think what he meant in this context is that you can't use deductive reasoning as the main learning strategy in literature and history.

trebor2• 17 years ago

As far as I understand it, epistemology is worldview.

algorias4• 17 years ago

It's the study of worldviews (loosely speaking), not a worldview.

Grinnmarr• 17 years ago

Metaphysics is more akin to "world view" although one's epistemological opinions/beliefs are certainly informative of their prevailing ontological stance.

ZLOB-o-ZLOB• 17 years ago

It is a fact in a meaning that you either accept it or all other statements about epistemology lose its meaning

yters2• 17 years ago

Ok, go stand in front of a bus.

vorador• 17 years ago

Well, you can not prove that the bus would run over him every time he tries it.

jordan_stewart2• 17 years ago

1. How does that prove anything? What you are effectively saying is that standing in front of a bus will only kill you in an objective universe.

2. The comment you replied to did not state that the commentator holds that view, it was merely an observation that they didn't expect certain content in the article.

algorias4• 17 years ago

The point is not whether or not he's right (which is an incredibly tricky question, actually, when you stop generalizing in a cartoonish way), it's that he's presenting something as fact which is definitely not provable.

paraschopra• 17 years ago

Did you mean a moving bus?

restruct• 17 years ago

"Instead of doing what’s easy for you, do what’s easy for your reader."

It is easier for the author to convert the PowerPoint into a PDF, but what is easier for the reader is if the information was in HTML/web format. The author should package the information so that it enters our heads as easily as possible.

This is why user-centered interfaces are better than programmer-centered interfaces. The point is to make it easier for the user, not easier for the programmer.

selven• 17 years ago

Indeed. You're taking the effort of making it once, but the collective readers are taking the effort of reading it tens, hundreds or thousands of times.

mitko• 17 years ago

Really strong beginning just to spoil it in the second part with his own opinions about the scientific method and how to make conclusions.

In my opinion this single topic is impossible to fit in a presentation. A book is more reasonable format. I would recommend "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"

DavidSJ• 17 years ago

He says:

Popper’s principle implies: (1) Your guesses and opinions have to be testable. They have to say what will not happen. Beware of vague predictions that are compatible with any outcome!

But that is Popper's view as to the demarcation of science. Popper was not of the view that science is the only realm of legitimate knowledge. And it's in conflict with:

If all knowledge depends on physical measurement, then not only do you lose truth, beauty, and love, you also lose mathematics, logic, and even epistemology!

tlb2• 17 years ago

Truth, beauty and love can be tested. If I think someone loves me, I can hug them and see how they hug back. If I think something's beautiful, I can hang it on my wall next to something else I think is beautiful, and see if I still like it next week. Truths can be tested by finding & testing physical implications of that truth. None of these tests are absolute Popper-grade refutations, but they're good enough to be useful.

Startups are generally based on some hypothesis (like "people want to communicate by multicasting 140-character messages"). Not refutable, exactly, but testable by building a company around it. Smart founders keep track of their hypotheses and are always looking for evidence for and against them.

yters2• 17 years ago

Right, testability doesn't necessarily mean physical measurements.

swombat5• 17 years ago

The existence of the concept of truth cannot be tested. It must be assumed. It is axiomatic to our thought processes.

jimbokun2• 17 years ago

"I can hang it on my wall next to something else I think is beautiful, and see if I still like it next week."

You know if you still like it, but you don't know if it is beautiful. You might like ugly things.

benhoyt• 17 years ago

Very good. The 25->8 word exercise was a good little demo.

Though I smiled when I saw "if you can spell ... int main(int argc; char* argv[]);" -- his first semicolon should be a comma in C. Also: the world is (more or less) spherical, not round. :-)

swombat5• 17 years ago

I don't really understand why this got 100 points. It's a passably good presentation, at least for the first half, but serving it out as a pdf was silly (why not just upload it to slideshare if you must share it in slide form?) and it really degenerated into randomness as it progressed.

It's alright, but not good enough to deserve top spot on HN for hours. Maybe it's just a really slow news day for HN.

bmr• 17 years ago

Very similar to Brian Garner's writings and his push to simplify legal writing. He recommends four stages of writing:

Madman - put ideas on paper with no regard for formalities

Architect - organize ideas into a a rough outline

Carpenter - "build" according to the architect's specifications, still with little regard for word choice or grammar

Judge - edit carefully for word choice, syntax, and grammar

systemtrigger• 17 years ago

text-only version: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/142733/Text/on_writing.html

RK• 17 years ago

Thank you. The white text on a red background was killing me.

dhughes• 17 years ago

I found it easy to read, my eyes tend to wander when reading black text on white, maybe I have ADD or something, I found the huge white text on the dark red background easy to read, relaxing. Weird.

Chocobean• 17 years ago

I found the colour okay, if a little distracting, but having to constantly scroll across slides was the most irritating bit.

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

I think the take home lesson here about writing more clearly has to do with presenting your text in a format that is easy to read. Thanks!

mark_l_watson• 17 years ago

That is good! I like the bit about unselfish writing. I tr to do that but can't always pull it off.

lucifer• 17 years ago

'How to express your thoughts clearly' is the more honest title for his presentation.

abalashov3• 17 years ago

This strikes me as a mechanistic, black-and-white view of certain aspects of thinking and learning that are, in reality, replete with many nuances, qualifications and caveats. It's a classic case of simplistic, Philistine shotgun approaches.

His disdainful view of the value of rhetoric and vicious hostility to the achievements of high culture, or the use of language in artistic ways to express in more aesthetically appealing ways thoughts that can be expressed more "simply" toward largely semantically equivalent ends (from an empirical perspective, anyway) also rubs me the wrong way.

I mean, sure, saying something as tersely as possible is often valuable and a good lesson to teach. It is also often the wrong thing to do or, more likely than being flat-out wrong it simply has costs as well as benefits. What precisely those are depends on what you're trying to achieve with your writing.

Should one take Dr. Covington's suggestions when writing a novel, an interesting anecdote, or a persuasive expository essay, even if one is otherwise partial to the goals of clarity in the thinking and writing that goes into it? Do most writers we consider interesting, compelling, thought-provoking, intriguing, entertaining, etc. follow his stylistic suggestions? Would their writing conserve those essential qualities if they did?

In short, while his objectives may be good lessons for people that write in unclear, logically incoherent or circumlocutory ways, he seems to tend toward very extreme reductions. It is a necessary part of intellectual development to learn to grapple with the complexity that inheres in many facets of existence, and that includes gestalt complexity that cannot be reduced to very simple atoms as, for example, in the ontology Functional Programming preaches. The world is not a giant software construction.

abstractwater2• 17 years ago

Should one take Dr. Covington's suggestions when writing a novel, an interesting anecdote,

I really don't think that's what Covington meant.

abalashov3• 17 years ago

By his own criteria, I am taking the title of his presentation literally and denotationally, in the most simpleminded, straightforward and unambiguous way possible. After all, if he doesn't quite say precisely what he means, he's not writing very "clearly," is he?

He purports to teach me to "How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn Complex Material More Easily."

I don't buy it.

ams61102• 17 years ago

The five steps in the writing process: Planning, Drafting, Revising, Editing, Formatting.

Formatting is last. This is why I like to write in plain text (I use emacs, but that's not really important). When I use something like MS Word, formatting is in your face from the get-go (probably 80% of the toolbar and menu items concern formatting), and I tend to sidetrack into formatting too much at the expense of properly organizing my ideas.

CamperBob2• 17 years ago

He left out the all-important sixth step: "Compiling."

("If you can spell

    int main(int argc; char* argv[]);

you can learn how to spell its and it’s!" -- page 47)

berntb2• 17 years ago

I'd guess that for quite a few people on this site, C is closer to their native language than English...

(I'm not an example. My English was good enough to read books about three years before I learned C.)

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

So, now we at least know he's not a C programmer.

rauljara• 17 years ago

"Because the world is objectively real, of course some things are better than others, by any reasonable criteria."

Given a set of criteria with objective measures, one can objectively tell if something meets those criteria, or not, or whether it meets more of those criteria, or not. But words like better and good express emotional value judgements. It is, as far as I can tell, impossible to prove that my criteria for what makes something good is objectively better than yours.

E.g., I may think food A is better than food B because it is spicier. You may may think food A is worse than food B for the very same reason. How do you determine whose version of better really is?

bcl• 17 years ago

For those who are unaware of who he is, here is his blog - http://www.covingtoninnovations.com/michael/blog

Flow• 17 years ago

Anyone got a mind-map version? :)

chasingsparks• 17 years ago

If you enjoyed this slideshow, see Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: http://www.pragprog.com/titles/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-...

It yielded a productivity boon in some areas for me.

Lagged2Death• 17 years ago

Am I the only one who sees irony in the existence of a "Write More Clearly" lesson presented as a disjointed set of sentence fragments?

MikeCapone• 17 years ago

Did you think it was unclear?

I found it very clear.

keeptrying• 17 years ago

Yup same here. I found it much easier to read white on red.

In my experience, to write better, you need to write more. Starting a blog about something I love has greatly improved the quality of my written communication.

http://newkiter.com

teeja• 17 years ago

"At most, an educated person needs help with only a few small points of grammar."

Especially the difference between lie, lay, laid, lied, lain, layed, and lying !!

How to Write Clearly, Think Clearly, and Learn Easily

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