
Rare is the leader who can actually write well - robg
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123154076720569453.html?mod=rss_Politics_And_Policy
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Alex3917
"If you are trying to decide between a few people to fill a position, always
hire the better writer. It doesn't matter if that person is a designer,
programmer, marketer, salesperson, or whatever, the writing skills will pay
off. Effective, concise writing and editing leads to effective, concise code,
design, emails, instant messages, and more.

That's because being a good writer is about more than words. Good writers know
how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put
themselves in someone else's shoes. They know what to omit. They think
clearly. And those are the qualities you need."

<http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch08_Wordsmiths.php>

~~~
coolnewtoy
As a CS grad student with an undergrad degree in creative writing, I always
feel like I have to explain how I got here.

I usually tell people I have an affinity for metaphors, and remind them that
their desktop, folders and files are all electronic metaphors.

~~~
derefr
I'm double-majoring in CS and creative writing--I'm trying to synthesize a
curriculum that leads directly to being an optimal choice as a game designer (
_not developer_.) People who think I'm trying to be a developer don't get the
writing part, and people who think I'm trying to be something like a
screenwriter don't get the CS part. It's all very frustrating, but I think
it'll work out.

~~~
unalone
What _is_ a game designer, out of curiosity? I mean, I get the basics, but
game designers don't do most of the programming, do they? They just need a
general overview of _how_ the game is working?

~~~
derefr
I could explain it, but it's easier to just show you an example. A game
designer writes things like this: <http://www.squidi.net/three/>

~~~
iron_ball
Coming up with new game ideas is the holy grail of game design, but a game
designer's day to day work is creating and refining game content, often
working with programmers to tweak the implementation.

For instance, take Super Mario Bros.: the developer would write the graphics
rendering code, physics, make a level editor, etc, but it's the game designers
who decided beforehand what the concepts would be, and work afterward to
create and playtest the levels themselves until the game is fun.

For a more modern example, in World of Warcraft, developers push all the
polygons and worry about collision detection and timing of spell effects,
while game designers say "the fireball spell should do n damage at x range,
and the Whatzisname questline should have such-and-such a set of rewards;
here's the dialogue script."

If you prefer, you can think of developers as providing the toolkit, and
designers as building the game with it, but in a much more iterative process.

~~~
unalone
Okay! That makes a lot of sense. Thanks a lot for explaining.

Are you in that job right now, to my parent post? What sorts of things have
you learned from it? What trends do you see developing within the industry?

~~~
iron_ball
I don't work in the game industry. I'm just a lifelong player who has talked
from time to time with game developers. So don't take this as gospel, but
here's my take on long-term prospects.

"AAA" games, the real earthshakers like Halo and World of Warcraft, can only
be made by large teams with multi-million-dollar budgets. Inescapable truth.
Success in conventional game development has come to depend more and more on a
corporate lifestyle: no loose cannons, no lone geniuses. Game developers have
to master their C and C++ and perfect their 3D optimizations; game designers
have to be very lucky, very hardworking, and very low-paid. (The design side
is much harder to break into.)

Games from established studios have to be guaranteed moneymakers, mostly
appealing to 15-to-35-year-old males, which is why we see lots and lots of
online gunplay and me-too rhythm and karaoke games. The sudden upswing in
rhythm and karaoke games points out the increasing mainstreaming of video
games, though, which brings me to point 2:

Independent development. The internet has made it extremely easy to write a
simple game in Flash or something and get it plastered all over the internet.
You go viral with a decent business model, you can cash in, and quite a few
games have already been optioned for downloadable console ports after an
online success. Especially for casual games -- pick-up-and-go entertainment,
usually in the puzzle category -- this can be a great road to recognition, and
it's the only one available to the reclusive-genius solo programmer.

Solo development with internet distribution is also the only way to release
game types that just aren't that popular these days. I've been playing a game
named The Spirit Engine 2 [ <http://thespiritengine.com/> ] lately; if you
look at the screenshots, you can see that it's not the kind of game that would
fly on the mass market.

In fact, my advice to anyone who wants to "make games" is just to make games.
Don't go work for a game company. You'll do more work for less pay than you
would in any other programming job, and you probably won't even scratch your
game-creation itch -- you think you'll be slaving away on Doom 7, but it's far
more likely that you'll be fixing graphics buffer glitches in Horsez [
<http://www.amazon.com/Horsez-Nintendo-DS/dp/B000GJ0J1K> ].

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protomyth
Regardless of political belief, Reagan was a prolific writer of letters that
were articulate and thoughtful. I seem to remember someone collected them into
a book.

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makecheck
I would add to this that writers ideally be able to use "8th grade English",
so it is easy for any English speaker to read.

It's a global workforce. Yet too often, I see a colleague send a brain dump of
3 or 4 paragraphs to someone in another country. Imagine yourself having to
use a translation dictionary for half of that?

It really helps if you use just common English words, in brief sentences. And
yes, this might take extra editing time. Yet, this helps anyone reading it,
not just those with English as a second language.

~~~
dissenter
You're approaching it from the wrong perspective. English is the lingua
franca. If your colleague were really nice, he would translate his message
into Hindi, but that isn't an effective use of time. Neither is writing in
Simple English.

Let the recipient use a dictionary. After a while he won't have to anymore.

~~~
makecheck
That isn't really fair to the recipient. Why should he or she spend extra time
figuring out what you said, and you spend no time at all making it easier to
read?

~~~
Retric
If the company is paying me 10x what it's paying them then it's probably more
cost effective for me to brain dump (if it's clear) than it is to clean up for
the reader. This is not about outsourcing the same thing happens with emails
from senior management.

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Raphael
Rare is a company that made GoldenEye for N64.

~~~
curiousgeorge
Fantastic game. Played it enough back in college to realize that the spawn
points in multiplayer weren't random. That realization changed the dynamics of
the game somewhat....

More on-topic, I think the title is wrong. People who can write well tend to
be better at social organization. Mao was - among other things - a librarian
and poet.

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diN0bot
the data doesn't necessarily back up that leaders _aren't_ good writers. maybe
recent american politicians, but what about Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin
(not a President, but on the $5 note), not to mention the writers of the
federalist papers and constitution. maybe we're talking about a different kind
of "write well".

~~~
anamax
Benjamin Franklin's autobiography is a hoot. (Lincoln is on the $5, Franklin
is on the $100.)

Jefferson gets all the good press, but Franklin was more accomplished at more
things. (Ben did fundamental work in electricity.)

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jodrellblank
I don't write much in terms of stories, poems, blog articles, essays, etc. But
I do write a lot in forum posts, emails and everyday work notes (into the tens
of thousands of posts over the years).

Yet I've never got much feedback about my writing style. With ten thousand
posts of careful practise, I would presumably be pretty good by now. What a
wasted opportunity.

~~~
unalone
I find that forum posts (like on Hacker News) help a lot with writing essays,
if for no other reason than it helps you develop your arguments. Ditto blog
articles, though every blog is different and most of the "good" blogs are
terrible.

Stories are different, though learning to construct an argument helps you plan
out stories. Learning the aesthetics of a language isn't something forumming
helps with. And poetry is an entirely different entity from either: it's
almost all aesthetic.

The problem with feedback is that each thing you do is trying to do something
different. If you state yourself clearly online, there's not much more you
_have_ to do. And yet look at somebody like why the lucky stiff, who's
elevated his writing style to a level above anything I've encountered online.
He doesn't have to do that, but he does it anyway.

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gruseom
s/actually//

~~~
jodrellblank
The only valid use of 'actually' that I can think of is to correct someone in
a smug way ('actually: synonymous with 'you idiot''). Any other use seems to
be filler. Am I missing some good uses for it?

"1 + 1 is 11" " _acccctually_ , it's 2"

~~~
kragen
I had a coworker who used to use "in reality" in place of "actually", which is
even worse. Usually he used it immediately prior to statements that needed
quite a bit of justification. It used to drive me nuts. Eventually I realized
that when he said, "in reality," he meant, "in my opinion," and from then on
we got along much better.

~~~
matta
ACTUALLY, I was simply dropping the "my" from "in my reality", since in so
many situations you seemed to be inhabiting your own unique reality. :)

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kingkongrevenge
No Mussolini or Caesar on the list? Is it English only?

Isn't Mao's Little Red Book one of the most printed books in human history?

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vchakra
That should be - "Rare is the leader who can actually write good"

