Improving my writing skill by writing persuasively on blogs, HN, etc. is why I spend time here.
I've always hated writing, from my first english courses. I felt the way it was done, with an overemphasis on creative writing (which is of limited use in many real-world situations, beyond developing technique), and the focus on word count (write me a 3 pager, if it's less your grade goes down) was a detriment to clear, concise, well written and direct communication.
Writing in school should quickly progress past the creative stage after middle school, and focus on technical, nonfiction, and other explanatory methods through high school. It should be split off from literature courses, which would better be combined with philosophy and history.
Similarly, I hated typing classes. I learned to type by telnetting into MUDs and learning it on my own. This was much more fun and less of a grind than typing "cat cat cat dog cat cat" over and over. The downside? I can never use an ergonomic keyboard, as I hit the "b" key with my left index finger.
The focus on word count in education is absurd, and I cannot help but feel it contributes to the use of 'business speak' and vague waffling e-mails that workers and customers are subject to every day.
It seems to me that people get it drummed into them that length is proportional to importance. This is not true; the best writing conveys its point simply and elegantly.
"[Writing] is finished not when there's nothing left to add, but when there's nothing left to take away." (paraphrased)
I agree. My daughter, a sophomore in high school, sent me a paper for review before printing. I made her re-write it from scratch. The problem was that the assignment was simple but vague: write a 1-2 page paper on the civil rights movement, At first glance, that assignment description doesn't sound, bad, but 1-2 pages to a high school student can be interpreted as "fill 1-2 pages with words".
I had her pick 3 points she wanted to make, do a little bit of online research on each point to develop a paragraph on two on each, and then add real introduction and conclusion paragraphs.
It's a simple formula that they teach in schools, but they don't reinforce when they give writing assignments. The assignment would have been clearer if the teacher had asked for 3-5 major influences on the civil rights movement. Sometimes you get what you ask for.
The nice thing was that, afterward, my daughter said that this way was a lot easier. BS'ing is hard work! One of the things I've noticed in both school and the workplace is that a lot of people expend more energy trying to avoid work then it would take just to do the work in the first place.
"One of the things I've noticed in both school and the workplace is that a lot of people expend more energy trying to avoid work then it would take just to do the work in the first place."
Criminals are a perfect example of this. I see a movie like "The Town" by Ben Affleck and I think to myself, "man, all that stress and hard work and almost certainty of death and/or federal prison goes into this, and most of the time they'll walk out with less than 6 figures when it's all divided up".
I think the problem is alot of people never learned how to think in small bits at a time. Our mind is cluttered like one of those hoarder/packrat types they exploit on reality TV. We're thinking about how complex the overall problem has to (or is going to) be, instead of just chunking it out into separate problem domains and tackling them one at at time. The myriad things we have in our head induces paralysis. Distractions like HN and reddit don't exactly help alleviate that, btw :D
For example: Programming a game that has a main character jumping around throwing ninja stars while avoiding spike pits, sword-wielding baddies, and evil wizards shooting fireballs sounds like a daunting task, but starting with "let's move the character thingy around the screen" might be less mind-meltingly hard. But, people just think about the end-goal and just shrug off how others can accomplish it as "magic".
Maybe that's why people choose to be employees rather than entrepreneurs: Complexity kills motivation. Entrepreneurs are just better equipped to tackle complexity one problem at a time.
I think it's unfair to say that the focus on word count is absurd. Like most things, writing well requires practice. The only meaningful metric educators have to determine whether a student has actually practiced is word count. The unfortunate thing about the way writing is taught isn't the emphasis on word count; it's the total neglect of editing.
I received a formal education in technical writing. In college, I probably submitted a peak of 40 thousand words to my professors in a single semester. But I wrote at least double that, in the form of things like notes, outlines, and stuff discarded as inadequate or unnecessary. That was the chief thing I learned: not to write less, but to discard more.
One of my favorite adages about writing is a good complement to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's quote. It's Sturgeon's Law: "Ninety percent of everything is crud." To get ten good words, you're going to have to write 100. I don't think it's a bad idea to teach that to kids, so long as they're taught to throw away the other 90.
I've always hated writing, from my first english courses. I felt the way it was done, with an overemphasis on creative writing (which is of limited use in many real-world situations, beyond developing technique), and the focus on word count (write me a 3 pager, if it's less your grade goes down) was a detriment to clear, concise, well written and direct communication.
Writing in school should quickly progress past the creative stage after middle school, and focus on technical, nonfiction, and other explanatory methods through high school. It should be split off from literature courses, which would better be combined with philosophy and history.
Similarly, I hated typing classes. I learned to type by telnetting into MUDs and learning it on my own. This was much more fun and less of a grind than typing "cat cat cat dog cat cat" over and over. The downside? I can never use an ergonomic keyboard, as I hit the "b" key with my left index finger.