
Good writing is a business advantage - kervokian
https://adaged.blogspot.com/2020/04/good-writing-is-business-advantage.html
======
austincheney
Superior writing skills are one of two things that separate novice developers
from experts. This, as judged from experience, is self-evident to all people
except bad developers. Here are the criteria that are generally most
important:

* precision: This is perhaps most important. The ability to communicate tiny finite details that immediately reflects the product as a whole in a way that is universally clear to a wide audience in the same way is paramount.

* directness: Say what you mean. Don’t waste people’s time with distractions and pleasantries. Put the most important things first. If the audience wishes to read more they will.

* conciseness: There is an art to the careful description of technical details, behaviors, and examination of a subject that is both precise and still expressed in the fewest words/statements. An extended vocabulary is helpful.

* organization: Almost everything complex is open to more simplistic description as a subject of intrinsic relationships. The ability to perceive, understand, and convey those relationships is logic at its most base foundation but only when the those relationships are orderly and supported by evidence.

A common mistake is to be clever about organization, relationships, and their
logic. Don’t do that. People do this as a weak form of manipulation, but
strong communicators will tear it apart.

All of these points on writing are directly evident in well written code as
well as formally expressed writings for general audiences.

~~~
snowwrestler
Here's the "one weird tip" life hack to do all of these things: revise and
rewrite.

Important communications should go through multiple drafts. That includes
important emails. Write it all out, then re-read it carefully, ideally after a
bit of time has passed. Edit with an eye toward making it shorter. Rewrite it
from scratch if you have to.

I once had the good fortune to take a writing class with Edward Hoagland. We
spent most of the semester with each student working on a single essay--
reviewing it, editing it, rewriting it, rewriting it.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
My last writing professor didn't have a Wikipedia page, but he was fantastic,
and taught with an approach on iteration: He allowed us to submit our
assignments for review, and then let us take back the paper to work on it
more, and we could continue to do that until it was an A paper.

This essentially guaranteed everyone an A in the course, if they did the work.
But the focus was on getting you to improve your writing, not to fail people
out. My opinion is that this is how writing should be taught, rather than
giving you one shot to get a grade.

(I also once had a writing teacher who gave me a zero for a paper because it
wasn't submitted in a manilla folder, and no late submissions were accepted,
so I had no chance to fix it.)

~~~
WalterBright
My father was a professor of business finance for a few years. He wrote on the
board the first lecture that if any of the following words were misspelled, it
was an automatic F:

1\. business

2\. entrepreneur

3\. your, you're

4\. its, it's

5\. they're, their, there

Also, for the term paper due at the end of the semester, for every day the
paper was late, one grade would be subtracted. I.e. 2 days late meant a B
would become a D. No excuses would be accepted, as they had the entire term to
get it done.

The first time he taught this course, half the students were a day or more
late. He followed through. The next year, word apparently got out as he only
received one late paper.

His point was that in business, excuses were not acceptable.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The example I gave was of a terrible writing professor: I learned no writing
in her course. Because when her arbitrary requirement that the paper be in a
manilla folder cost me two letter grades for the whole course, I dropped her
course, rather than accept a C as my highest achievable grade. It's the sole
withdrawal in my entire transcript. Furthermore, I never got any legitimate
feedback on the paper, which I put a lot of time and thought into.

It's important to teach the values of timeliness and attention to detail, but
you aren't teaching anything if you're not giving students a way to recover
and improve.

~~~
WalterBright
There was a lot of skepticism with this from the students at first. They
didn't take it seriously. But after the first semester, the students took a
liking to "no bullshit, no excuses" and thrived on it. His classes swelled
with students.

If you're in business, and write business letters misspelling "business", you
aren't going to be taken seriously (though you likely won't realize why the
rejections are happening). If you graduate from a business school and can't
spell "business" then the school's reputation suffers, too.

In college, you're an adult. The requirement that "business" be spelled
correctly is made quite clear. No excuses, no bullshit.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
But while the second year, the "word had gotten out", how many students may he
have seriously harmed the careers of to make his "point" in the meantime?
Would a subtler corrective action been equally effective at outputting
successful students without harming others?

~~~
WalterBright
I remember a story about Chuck Yeager. He was put in command of an Air Force
base during the Korean War. He noticed the pilots were putting in sloppy
landings.

So one day, he got the pilots together, went out to the runway, painted two
strips crossways and demanded that all pilots touch down within the stripes.
There was a bunch of whining about it from the pilots that it was unfair and
impossible.

So Yeager fired up a jet, took off, circled the field, and landed precisely in
the center between the lines. He got no more guff from the pilots and they
straightened up.

Me, if I was in a combat squadron I'd choose to serve under Yeager rather than
a commander that tolerated sloppy flying skills. Sloppy skills will get you
killed in aviation and especially combat.

~~~
mhh__
Curtis LeMay apparently had a similar issue with the abort rate over japan
(Pilots making up technical issues to avoid getting over the target/flak), so
his solution was "I fly in the lead plane, anyone who turns around gets court-
martialled" -> abort rate drops over night.

Story is taken from "The Fog of War" as told by Robert S. McNamara.

------
jasode
_> Here's a promotional film on the car that was sent to me on Saturday. It's
almost impossible for me to believe this passes for work today. It's
incomprehensible, unappealing, uninteresting and meaningless. It provides no
information that makes me want the car._

The blog author misunderstands that the BMW car video ad is deliberately _not_
supposed to convey concrete information. Abstract ads are typical of _" brand
awareness advertising"_ vs _" product specific advertising"_.

I made some previous comments about the difference between _" concrete
informational ads"_ vs _" abstract aspirational ads"_[0][1]. Yes, the ad
agencies choosing to communicate abstract ads are infuriating to us but they
don't care because they are going for a deliberate and calculated emotional
effect.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20034558](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20034558)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9877422](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9877422)

~~~
solatic
You're missing the larger change in society that advertising is adapting to.

Few people have the attention span anymore to read all of the copy in BMW's
old ads. Ad agencies could hire Hemingway himself, it wouldn't make any
difference. People look at the picture, the headline, and move on.

So-called brand advertising (at least, print brand advertising) serves as an
admission on the part of marketers that, if they can't fit the whole AIDA
model into a single ad anymore, they can at least try to push Awareness as
much as possible.

Doesn't mean that brand advertising is particularly effective.

~~~
uryga
> Few people have the attention span anymore to read all of the copy in BMW's
> old ads

or could it be that everything is so oversaturated with ads that spending two
minutes _voluntarily_ reading fluffy ad copy just doesn't seem like a great
use of time, even if it's well written?

attention span is its own problem, but connecting the two like this seems...
odd.

\---

 _EDIT, had more thoughts on this_

i mean, i like the old VW Beetle ads. they're charming and clever and i enjoy
reading them. but that's because the element of "trying to get me to buy
something" isn't relevant anymore, i'm experiencing the (long-dead) ad
willingly. but if the ad is a normal ad i see in a magazine... no way i'm
giving it my undivided attention for two minutes just so it can manipulate me
into liking X

~~~
jonfw
I agree, there is still plenty of money invested in product placements in long
form content, or sponsored 'review' articles.

It's not so much that they don't write copy, it's that they try to avoid
telling you that it's copy

------
dx87
In general, technical people severely underestimate the value of good writing.
My wife has a MS in Professional Writing, no technical background, and got
hired to work in the IT department at a major publishing company. While there,
her entire job was writing up guides, announcements, etc., that were going to
be disseminated to the rest of the company. Management had identified that a
bunch of time/money was being wasted because the IT team had nobody who could
write in a non-technical matter, so non-technical employees were giving a lot
of pushback on IT changes that they didn't see the benefit of.

Even though the IT employees would constantly make snide remarks about her
having a "soft degree", management loved her because she could take technical
information, even if she didn't fully understand it herself, and translate it
into a format that could be understood by the rest of the company.

~~~
goatherders
At the risk of offending many HN'ers, I think many (most?) technical people
severely underestimate the value of most "non technical" things. Sales,
marketing, writing...

~~~
growlist
Having swung away from the technical somewhat and back again, my opinion is
that many techies could make a decent fist of the non-technical side if they
were forced into it, whereas the reverse would end in absolute disaster.

~~~
munificent
I used to be a game developer, which involves working with lots of people
across different domains. I've seen no evidence that programmer art is any
better than artist code. Given the choice between working with a programmer-
turned-artist or an artist-turned-coder, I would almost always prefer the
latter because they tend to be more aware of their deficiencies and able to
accept help from others.

The kind of black-and-white thinking that programmers are understandably prone
to often leads to them denying the existence of their own blind spots.

~~~
growlist
Interesting point that I hadn't thought of, though I'd counter that art as
it's involved in video games is very much a technically skilled endeavour, no?

------
paultopia
I don't understand why this essay starts with an excursus on economic decline
before veering around the corner to talk about writing and the author's---no
shit---comparison of himself to Einstein? And then closes with a bunch of
screenshots of BMW ads, evidently (?) as an example of Good Writing of the
Past, but where those ads (that is, the alleged exemplars of writing) are too
blurry to read, even zoomed in?

This is, dare I say it, exceedingly bad writing.

~~~
chasedehan
It seems as though you read the entire article and cared enough to make a
comment about it. Those are not characteristics of bad writing even if it is
disagreed with.

~~~
bagacrap
bit of a catch-22, wouldn't you say? If you read it, it must be good; if you
don't read it, you aren't qualified to rate it.

------
Angostura
Here's a little test for your company and your website.

Is it easier for me to work out what the hell you do by looking up your
company on Wikipedia than it is is by looking at your website.

A surprising number of companies fail the Wikipedia test, because marketing
and management somehow feel that simple language sdescrtibing what they do
somehow devalues the importance. "We're valuable because we're complex. Our
marketing material needs to make what we do seem very complex".

~~~
Tepix
It's normal for a company website to fail this test. After all, explaining
what a company does is the sole purpose of a wikipedia article about a
company.

The company website on the other hand has many more objectives.

~~~
Ididntdothis
What objectives are these? I have had quite a few occasions where I tried to
look up what a project does and couldn’t figure it out from the website. I
only learned that the product is really cool and makes young, diverse and good
looking people happy.

~~~
goatherders
Its easier to sell a product that is really cool and makes young, diverse, and
good looking people happy than it is to sell what a product does. The purpose
of a website is to sell things. That's why the "About Us" page isn't the home
page.

~~~
bagacrap
It's not like "about us" has anything relevant either. Usually it's some
origin story about the positive change the founder wanted to gift to the
world.

~~~
scollet
In other words, a bagacrap.

------
erispoe
It took me more than 5 minutes, reading through more than half the article,
and watching the video clip in its entirety, to realize what this blog post
what about. Is this good writing?

In the end, the proof is in the pudding. Is this selling cars? It's very hard
to measure the marginal effect of one ad, but to the extent that we can do it,
this is what the yardstick of advertisement is.

edit: putting -> pudding typo

~~~
qnsi
Exactly! Title is so misleading I stopped reading after a second.

------
goatherders
From grade 7 to grade 12 my education was heavily writing focused. I didn't
take a history, civics, or English test that wasn't 100% written. In college I
took classes that were focused on writing as well, mostly because I could
write better than I could study for/take a test.

That has made me an adult with no real skills except the ability to
communicate very well. More specifically, I'm able to write very well. And I
find it staggering how many people cannot write with any quality.

Rewinding to college - I funded my beer and fun fund by writing other people's
term papers. The first year or two out of school I paid the rent by writing
other people's term papers. I run a marketing business now and despite my
hatred for spending the time writing longform, a good chunk of our revenue
comes from people overpaying for content simply because finding good writers
is hard.

While many people say that understanding how to code is perhaps the most
valuable skill available to young people during their education, I would offer
that writing well is of greater significance and use. There are plenty of
excellent careers, vocations, and paths in life where any measure of success
can be reached without knowing how to code. There are far fewer where not
being able to write is not a hindrance.

~~~
cloudier
How do you prove to others that you can write? I’m assuming that you have a
portfolio that shows your writing — is that the case? How do you tell if your
writing is good quality? Are your clients able to evaluate that too?

I suspect the issue is that it’s really easy to evaluate technical skills like
coding, but I am not sure since I don’t work in a writing-focused occupation.

~~~
munificent
One thing that separates writing apart from many other fields is how _easy_ it
is for non-professionals to determine when it's done well. In fact, the
definition of good writing basically _is_ whether or not it has the intended
impact on its audience.

If you are moved, the writing is good.

This is in contrast with other fields where "goodness" also requires other
longer-term less tangible goals that are invisible to non-professionals. If a
program does what you want right now, it may still not be made of good code
because it can be hard to maintain, or fail catastrophically in edge cases or
otherwise lack in ways that aren't immediately obvious.

You can be a poor chef who makes tasty food if your personality causes high
staff turnover or your ingredient choices and pricing kill your profitability,
all of which is hidden from the diner.

But the point of writing is to get an idea lodged in someone's head as
effectively as possible, and we're pretty good at evaluating whether that's
happened. The only case where it can clearly break down is journalism where
the ideas you transmit must be _factual_ in ways that require external
validation. A compelling news story that is false may be good "writing" at
some level, but isn't good journalism.

~~~
cloudier
I see, thanks for the clarification. I agree that coding has long-term
intangible goals that are difficult for a non-professional for to evaluate,
and it makes sense that this isn’t something that people face in many writing-
focused professions.

How do you evaluate and improve your own writing? Is this something that
requires simply seeing the reactions of other people, or is it something you
are able to simulate in your head? I think the reason why I thought it would
be hard for other people to evaluate writing skills, is that I find it hard to
tell when my own explanations are easy for other people to understand.

------
m52go
I really like this line in the article: "Bad writing is bad thinking." So
true. Sometimes I just write when I'm confused about something and it helps
clarify things.

Since this is HN, I'm going to add a shameless plug.

For 4 years I've run Write Battle, a game for writers (originally anyone
writing emails, instant messages, etc...but user base has largely turned out
to be marketers) to compete against each other to devise the most concise
prose. The best writing wins, as judged by brevity (response length) and
readability (Flesch-Kincaid).

Right now, as we speak, I'm turning these games into a set of interactive,
gamified, bite-size _courses_ to teach the basics of effective writing without
boring reading or lectures. I should have the first set of (free) courses done
in about a week [0].

My approach is that while grammar and formal rules are important, practical
effect is _more_ important, so the games and courses I've made so far focus
more on effectiveness than theory and rules. Turns out writing is more fun
that way too!

[0] [https://writebattle.com](https://writebattle.com)

~~~
papeda
Interesting, but today's prompt left me questioning the exercise. This is
because the prompt doesn't spell out the main point of the text in its
entirety. It doesn't even spell out what smaller goal the prompt is trying to
accomplish. So I'm sure it's possible to reshape the prompt into something
shorter and sweeter, but I don't know that it's better writing.

To me good writing is about communicating your point well. It's hard to tell
what I'm supposed to communicate from a few isolated lines.

~~~
anchpop
I agree. I got this prompt:

> Cybercrime is viewed as a serious threat to the prosperity and security of
> developed states, prompting the adoption of cyber security strategies across
> a range of countries. Although some malicious cyber activities are carried
> out in the pursuit of military or political objectives, a high proportion of
> cybercrime is financially motivated. According to one report, this was the
> case for 76% of all data breaches in 2017.

I had to read it three times to understand it. I could try to make it present
the information in a clearer way - maybe something like this?

> Many countries adopt cyber security strategies to mitigate threat from
> cyberattacks. Although some attacks are means to a political end, 76% of all
> data breaches are financially motivated.

(The algorithm didn't think this was a valid response, but I like it.)

But it feels hollow because I don't understand what the prompt is trying to
communicate. The average person eats almost 1500 pounds of food a year. Is it
trying to say that countries shouldn't worry about cyberattacks? Why does it
conflate cyberattacks to data breaches? There is no thesis or argument, they
seem like disconnected and soulless facts. In good writing, every sentence has
a purpose, and they build to a conclusion. Wasn't it confusing when I
mentioned how much food the average person eats when it had no clear relevance
to anything? That's how I felt with all the prompts I got. This still seems
like a cool site but I was a little let down.

~~~
m52go
You and parent comment are both right, but it's interesting because I haven't
heard this feedback before.

Part of what makes these games so playable is that they're quick and don't
require a whole lot of thought. It's a compromise. The intention is for
players to focus more on improving the technical aspects of the writing
presented instead of thinking too deeply about the message because more
context and more text to edit might add too much friction to the experience
(i.e., make the "game" into more of a "task").

I know it might not help a whole lot, but each game has a tiny bit of context
to help...the context for the current game (shown right above the game-play
box) is "Opening sentence of a research paper by a think tank."

Anyway, I'll think about ways to address this. Thanks for the feedback.

However I will also add that while these games are meant to be more fun than
serious...the "courses", on the other hand, will take message, content,
audience, etc into account and generally be much more thorough.

anchpop - your response wasn't considered valid because it did not include the
term "cybercrime". In hindsight this was a bad decision on my part -- each
game has a small set of strings that a response must include to be considered
valid (to avoid spam responses from messing up scoring). "Cybercrime" probably
shouldn't be one of them (sorry).

~~~
anchpop
I looked at more prompts. I think the three I checked out at random must have
been an unlucky sample because most of the ones I looked at just now have had
much more intention and clarity of purpose. I suspect you're getting this
feedback now and not earlier because you happened to post it on HN at the same
time as having an outlier prompt. Congrats on the site! It's really awesome.

------
pferde
After reading the title, I was hoping that the article would be not about
advertising, but about technical writing - whether in communication (email) or
documentation (internal or public).

Good writing is paramount for both of these contexts. From good text
formatting to realizing what the audience is and adjusting level of detail and
pace accordingly.

~~~
VieEnCode
Does HN have some resources to share on good technical writing?

~~~
macintux
It’s come up a time or twenty.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=technical+writing](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=technical+writing)

And while this is orthogonal, I’m sure there’s some overlap: this is a list of
links I’ve compiled on giving technical talks. I haven’t checked the links for
years, so I’m sure a few are broken.

[https://gist.github.com/macintux/5354837](https://gist.github.com/macintux/5354837)

~~~
VieEnCode
Very helpful resources, thanks! I've bookmarked them to go through.

------
keiferski
I can’t help but feel like we are on the verge of a new audiovisual era, one
in which long paragraphs of text are almost never seen in any marketing
context and eventually in most contexts.

The initial reaction of most educated people is probably horror at our new
illiterati leaders, but in an attempt to be optimistic, I’d note that the
widespread dominance of writing is something of a material historical
accident. Languages were originally spoken, not written. It’s been suggested
that the semi-mythical Homer was specifically depicted as blind in order to
emphasize that poetry is an aural art, not a visual (textual) one. If somehow
audio recording devices had been invented prior to paper, I think we’d be
living in a far different society, one filled with audio recordings rather
than books.

So, knowing this, the challenge is to adapt to this new reality and form of
communication and learn how to utilize it to achieve the level of depth seen
in literature. I’m fairly confident we’ll get there eventually: the art of
writing has been around for thousands of years, whereas video/film (moving
images) is barely over a century old. We’ve got time to master it.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
The Internet has been (depressingly) post-literate for a while.

I adore good English. IMO writing peaked in the middle of the last century.
There are some beautifully literate, clean, elegant, but unpretentious books
from that period. Like this one:

[https://www.amazon.com/Structures-Things-Dont-Fall-Down-
eboo...](https://www.amazon.com/Structures-Things-Dont-Fall-Down-
ebook/dp/B009G1PHP2)

Elegance and simplicity started to become rarer in the 70s, when writing
became more about ego, forceful persuasion, and opinionation and less about
communication.

Then YouTube happened, and now we're in the hyper-emotive era of "Wassup fam?"
and "Mash that Like button." And memes.

Some of it is certainly entertaining - because it has to be. But it's not so
good at sharing complex and nuanced world views.

So I don't think we will get there, because moving pictures and sound are
inherently not a literate medium. They can be a _literary_ medium, but you get
Maximum User Engagement™ with crude lowest-common-denominator content, and not
with subtlety, difficulty, or complexity.

~~~
keiferski
I don't really think you've understood my point. The art of writing is
thousands of years old, whereas the use of audiovisual media is barely a
century old. Widespread use and access to technology that lets you _create_
audiovisual communication and share it is perhaps 15-20 years old. This is
_extremely_ recent, considering that spoken language (which became writing)
was itself in development for hundreds of thousands of years.

The first writing by cavemen was probably scribbles, too. I'd give video
another thousand years before writing it off.

And to be clear: I am a writer by profession myself. So I'm definitely on the
side of "writing is important." I'm merely acknowledging that technology
trends are changing.

------
mapleoin
The new BMW ad actually speaks to me more than the old ones. I find the old
ones too blunt, whereas the new one is trying to be poetic and smooth,
purposefully contrasting with the old design and trying to create this utopic
vision of the future where everything is smooth and efficient. I even got the
feeling that there's a nice breeze in the car even though you're in the
desert.

~~~
Torwald
The old ads wer geared towards the people of those days in those days. The
idea is moving people to buy.

------
jsanford9292
Just like his "400 mi range BMW", I fear George will find himself on the wrong
side of history.

Let's start with cars: why has George gone out of his way to put down Tesla,
lumping it in to his "not-a-new-product" category, and decided to purchase an
objectively inferior electric vehicle (BMW)?

Maybe he likes the look of BMWs. I hope so. Or maybe he cannot stomach Tesla
because it represents the exact antidote to his entire argument: an
"incremental" product that requires no marketing or writing to easily outsell
the competition. If the future looks like a world where there are no "new
products" and great writing will be the meaningful differentiator between
products, why has Tesla decided to forgo writing altogether, great or not?

He makes a few salient points on the outskirts of the article. But the crux of
his argument is "good writing goes beyond almost anything outside of real
transformative technological leaps," one of which is not Tesla, as noted
earlier.

If you had to bet the future of societal progress on improving products vs.
improving writing, which would you choose?

If the future of advertising follows the future of autos, then I'm sorry but
George will be out of a job pretty soon here.

For all the hackers that get scared by these articles and run out to take a
writing class: don't. Focus on creating great products. As Elon does, let the
products speak for themselves.

Also George, small typo in paragraph 16: "I called by system "the three Ds.""

------
edraferi
I completely agree. I view this as a competitive advantage personally.

Like any skill, practice is the most important thing. Training helps,
especially grammar & structure coaching. That said, tools can help:

\- Hemmingway[0] has been useful to me. I often use it to revise things I
write elsewhere.

\- Grammarly [1] seems good, but I refuse to pipe everything I write to
(another) cloud. If I could run it locally or get a private on-prem instance
for my firm, that would be great.

\- Microsoft's new AI Editor [2] seems promising.

[0] [http://www.hemingwayapp.com/](http://www.hemingwayapp.com/)

[1] [https://www.grammarly.com/](https://www.grammarly.com/)

[2]
[https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/in...](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/introducing-
microsoft-editor-bring-out-your-best-writer-wherever/ba-p/1247931)

------
disease
Has anyone here made the leap from developer to technical writer? Or know
someone who has?

It sounds weird but I not only take pride in writing documentation for my
software, I actually enjoy doing so as well.

I'm sure this would result in a large pay cut but it may be worth it for the
change of pace.

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
I have not, but what I have done, is get to a place where documentation is a
“first class citizen” in my work.

I actually wrote an article about exactly that, fairly recently:
[https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/leaving-a-
legacy-1c2ddb0c...](https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/leaving-a-
legacy-1c2ddb0c8014)

It’s a fairly long read, compared to most of my articles, but I feel that it’s
an important topic.

My biggest issue with most modern tech writing, is that it is actually painful
to read.

It may be 100% correct, and impart very important information, but if I can
use it as a soporific, there’s a problem.

I find that writing in the vernacular, injecting personal anecdotes and [
_very_ carefully-chosen] humor and humanity into tech writing helps.

I write about extremely technical stuff; often walking through significant
code trails, but I have had non-technical people praise my writing, and read
the entire article.

------
manmal
I disagree with the argument that today's inventions are only incremental
improvements "because someone invented the automobile" \- if Tesla (or any
other manufacturer) really manages level 5 autonomy at some point, it will
indeed be a breakthrough. Or just take CRISPR - that in itself is a remarkable
invention. Improvements to solar cells and batteries will eventually upend the
whole energy sector.

I do agree with the author that good writing is a business advantage. E.g.
developers who are good at writing blog posts or email newsletters can become
widely known (and booked). I don't see the author make a compelling argument
in the article that supports this though.

~~~
martinald
Also, don't forget that inventing the car in the first place was a bunch of
"small" incremental improvements. Without improvements to steelmaking, the
combustion engine wouldn't have been possible. Without Ford's incremental
improvements to assembly lines, they would have been too expensive for mass
market, etc.

------
chiefalchemist
Yes, Comms is King. Whether written, verbal or other, the foundation of human
progress is comms; often taking form as influence.

That said, while well written, I don't agree with his argument. In general
selling - well, actually buying - is mostly driven by emotions and less
factual. Even B2B is emotiinal. "Will this decision help my career?"

We don't buy what X does (i.e., features). We buy benefits. That is, "what's
in it for me?" Yes, it makes sense to be upfront about features. Of course.
But it's benefits that sell.

------
arvinsim
I wish there was a concrete way of improving writing skills and getting
feedback ala Hackerrank

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
"Just do it."

That sounds familiar...

There's no substitute for repetitiveness and habit.

Feedback is important, but also valuable. It can be hard to get good feedback
for free.

I've found that just slapping stuff up there is important, as long as I keep
doing it, and make sure that whatever I "slap up" is of the best quality
possible.

Every few weeks, I stop what I'm doing, and spend a day or so, writing up an
entry about something. My usual read length is under fifteen minutes, but I
have a couple of prolix entries.

You can see what I write here:
[https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/](https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/)
and here:
[https://medium.com/chrismarshallny](https://medium.com/chrismarshallny)

I'm not a widely-read author, but everything I do; whether coding or writing,
is done as if I were publishing to the masses.

Establishes good habits.

I also find that writing in the vernacular seems to be received well. But
that's just me. YMMV.

~~~
arvinsim
I am an avid book reader and developer. I write book reviews and also try to
write good documentation as a means to improve my writing.

The only problem is finding someone or a group to receive good feedback.

------
ineedasername
This is (one of) the reasons why I am skeptical of arguments that are
dismissive of all formal coursework in college that isn't directly applicable
to the technical aspects of people whose majors are in STEM programs.

General education courses, required courses in history and humanities, they
provide a different way of critically thinking about things, and their
frequently heavy writing focus is excellent practice for a skill that will be
extremely useful in life, even if it isn't directly tied to your STEM program.

Consider this: And enormous amount of your quality of life, your career
advancement, and many other things are directly tied to your ability to
convince other people of your way of thinking. And writing is a fundamental
vehicle for that process.

------
at_a_remove
I am not a particularly great programmer. I am decent at documentation, to the
point where I have received unsolicited commentary about the technical
documents I produce and the comments in my code. My technical writing class is
largely to thank for it, plus a hefty dose of frustration at reading awful
documentation over the years, combing through code with almost no comments,
and the like.

Once your code "works," nobody cares about it -- they're on to the next thing
-- and then the next time it receives attention is if something goes wrong, or
something changes either coming in or going out. It is then that your code
will receive attention again. Having good docs on hand is going to make that
quite a lot better.

------
A4ET8a8uTh0
I watched the ad and read the comments. I am not a target audience either, but
I do respond to visuals. So I watched while mostly ignoring the semi-
aspirational talk.

The ad created mixed feelings for me. Frankly, it could have done away with
the voice over. Especially since it did not make much sense.

In a practical sense, the story told through video was sufficient.

Aesthetically, I dislike the new look. It looks nothing like I8 I was
expecting to see, but that is a personal preference. Inside looks futuristic
and cool, but not much more can be said beyond that.

I am oddly disappointed with BMW. They have all the money they need to unseat
Tesla, but they just can't seem to hack it. Eh, maybe Taycan will change the
field somewhat.

------
therealdrag0
If I were to make one request of people, it'd be that they re-read their own
writing before posting it--even to Slack or a code-review.

I feel like it's a daily occurrence that I have to read between the lines of
what people say and construct my own reply that does the heavy lifting of
moving the ball forward by outlining the different possibilities based on what
was said.

There's a sense in which lazy writers are offloading thinking onto others.
This sort of drive-by writing is pretty annoying IMO. And when there's not
someone in the room willing to do the meta-thinking of clarifying, it can lead
to misunderstanding or arguments.

------
econcon
Well reading/writing level are going down. Anyone who thinks, just because
they've graduated from some famous college are going to absolutely obliterate
competition in business are wrong. You need a language which most of your
customers can easily understand and most of the times those who come from
outside of the industry but have superior knowledge of language make fool of
themselves.

This is as someone who doesn't know much about English but have built a
company for English speakers.

------
nicbou
Good writing is a business advantage because it encompasses many other useful
business skills.

\- Writing clearly requires empathy. If you write documentation, you must put
yourself in the shoes of your confused users.

\- Writing requires storytelling skills. Writing something pleasant to read is
no small task.

\- Writing requires social skills. How you write things dictates how well
they'll be received. You have to sell your arguments and convince people with
very different priorities.

------
jariel
'Communicating' is almost a better term.

There are great writers who are not able to organise their ideas very well.

I think good business writing isn't really the same thing as creative writing
though they are both assets.

The ability to explain something very quickly in simple and succinct terms, so
that the value is really well understood by an audience without any context
... this is the key.

------
ubermonkey
I was never more than a middling coder, but I can write.

I've built a pretty great and remunerative career on being able to understand
technical things well enough to write about them for a less technical
audience.

~~~
Ididntdothis
It took me a while to appreciate that. A long time ago i noticed that a lot of
famous bloggers didn’t really write about groundbreaking things but relatively
trivial stuff. This annoyed me for a long time until i realized that being
able to write this stuff is a great skill by itself. I think I am a decent
developer and have done interesting things but I am having trouble
communicating my stuff. My impact could be much more if I could write about it
in a compelling way.

------
Daub
Effective writing might be an even better advantage.

------
bryanrasmussen
Surely every thing you use in furthering your business will confer an
advantage if it is a Good example of that thing?

------
hachibu
>(An advertisement for myself.)

I love the author's sense of humor.

------
asdffdsa
obligatory:
[https://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html](https://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html)

