Computer Science students, learn to write!
The single most important skill I learned in university while getting a degree in Computer Science was how to write better.
Everything important you do in your professional life is about communication. The ability to write clearly and concisely, with at least approximately correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation, is vital.
Despite what some people say to me on a regular basis, I am not “a natural” at this. I thought I was when I entered college. People had always told me what a great writer I was. Fortunately, I took some courses with tough teachers who crumpled up my shoddy writing and shoved it somewhere unspeakable, until I became less arrogant. I still have characteristic patterns that editors correct, so don’t think that I’m claiming to be a great writer even today. I just worked damn hard at it. Some of my best teachers were not English professors. They were history TAs and engineering ethics professors and chemistry lab assistants. I still remember when my history TA read my paper aloud to the class and said, “this is a great example of passive voice and why not to use it.” I had gotten through my second year of college without knowing what passive voice is, and I used it in practically every sentence.
It troubles me that a whole generation of engineers graduating today, sometimes even with advanced degrees, simply can’t communicate. It goes beyond the difference between “their” and “there”, or “its” and “it’s,” although those are pretty rampant sore spots too. It is about the structure and process of the thought that created the writing. Their writing is uninteresting and flat at best, and complete gibberish at worst. I don’t know how they are ever going to design safe bridges or air traffic control systems, or if they do, how they will ever get anyone to take them seriously.
So my advice is to skip a CS elective or two, and take some humanities courses, preferably by asking the department chair who is the biggest pedantic miserable fascist sonofabitch in the department, and suffering through those classes. Take history, religion, English, poetry, whatever it is that requires a lot of writing and will be graded harshly. And don’t assume that your high-school courses have taught you very much. I’ve seen a lot of what passes for excellence in high schools, and it’s not good enough.
Some of the best technical workers I’ve ever met were good at their jobs because they could communicate. One of the best DBAs I know was a French major.
Computer Science students, learn to write, and it will pay you back richly. Much more richly than that plum job at Google you’re dreaming about. Or is that “about which you’re dreaming?”
Couldn’t agree my more. While completing my Masters, I was a teaching assistant for a computer science course that focused on writing. Some of the grammar and style was a little scary.
Michael Mior
4 Aug 11 at 11:13 am
Totally agree with you there. In high school, my written English was pretty bad with failing grades until my Ancient history teacher (former university professor) took time out of her schedule to tutor me and drilled in me the correct way to write. Choosing Ancient history as an elective in high school, was the best thing I ever did in life. I was so confident, that nearly all my electives in university were in Political science and Psychology fields and boy do you have to write!
The writing skills I picked up from my Ancient history teacher, prepared me very well for university and beyond :)
Though, I think these days it’s very easy to get by with word processing software auto correcting grammar and spelling etc so the skill is lost to some in this generation.
George Liu
4 Aug 11 at 1:57 pm
To learn to write you need to read books, lots of them. There’s no shortcut.
PJ Brunet
6 Aug 11 at 5:11 pm
I’m a grad student in English Lit, and I also spend a fair amount of time telling students in the humanities to take a computer science and econ class before they graduate. Most look at me as I imagine a lot of engineers look at you when you tell them to learn how to write.
Some of this advice is elaborated on in “How Universities Work, or: What I Wish I’d Known Freshman Year: A Guide to American University Life for the Uninitiated.”
jseliger
8 Aug 11 at 2:06 pm
The irony here is that you don’t seem to be able to write well.
max
8 Aug 11 at 2:12 pm
There is that old adage that “Practice to make perfect”. I would like to add something to that. How you practice matters. If you do a lot of practice incorrectly, your end result will be perfectly incorrect. Which I believe is the point of this post. Everyone knows how to write, but not everyone knows how to write well or correctly. Over time we learn and reinforce some bad habits, which only a harsh teacher will show us and help us break those bad habits.
Really good post! Thank you for writing it.
Bryce
8 Aug 11 at 2:28 pm
Tell the industry, then students will follow.
Harry Pachty
8 Aug 11 at 2:44 pm
It’s unfortunate that one has to go to college and spend ~$10k+/year for 4 years (5 or 6?) to learn how to write properly. This after spending 12+ years in K-12 learning…. what? Why can’t people be taught in 12 years how to write well? In place of writing skills, what are we teaching ourselves in those 12 years that is so much more important?
Michael
8 Aug 11 at 2:48 pm
Asking me to skip a couple CS electives is like asking me to be less competitive in the job market.
How about we drop a few of the more useless humanities courses that are required; stupid bull shit like foreign language, “Viewing a Wider World” and those ilk.
than
8 Aug 11 at 3:06 pm
@PJ Everyone should read, and great writers are generally wide readers, but *just* reading is a sort of shortcut in itself (or perhaps a “longcut”) – what the author is saying, which I agree with, is that you have to *write* a lot, and show that writing to people with strong and surly opinions. Those of us who read a lot but never write are particularly susceptible to the baseless confidence in our writing that the author is referring to.
So yes, I agree with you PJ – read a lot of books, but don’t think that doing so will magically make you a good writer.
James Sanders
8 Aug 11 at 3:19 pm
@than You should probably take up econ too, so you can study the law of diminishing returns.
studied econ and cs
8 Aug 11 at 3:29 pm
@max: Please read the third paragraph completely. Note the following: “…don’t think that I’m claiming to be a great writer.”
ebenezer
8 Aug 11 at 3:29 pm
The reason a lot of high school students are told their writing is excellent is because, relative to the writing of most students, it is. That is to say that most students are so bad at writing it makes anyone who can form complete sentences look like a genius.
As for the recommendation of taking a humanities course in lieu of a CS elective, most students can’t be bothered. The biggest issue for me is that I’m positive that my grade for a CS elective will be higher than my grade in a writing course, and since GPAs seem to be big deal, this strikes me as a bad idea.
James Brewer
8 Aug 11 at 3:32 pm
Baron censored this comment for profanity. Keep it clean, please.
Paul
8 Aug 11 at 3:40 pm
“This after spending 12+ years in K-12 learning…. what? Why can’t people be taught in 12 years how to write well?”
Learn passive voice for 12 years–then get to college and find out your writing sounds too stuffy and academic ;-)
When I was in school–every year the same stuff: addition, subtraction, nouns, verbs. The curriculum is designed with the assumption your brain is empty after summer vacation.
Home schooling.
PJ Brunet
8 Aug 11 at 4:02 pm
“Those of us who read a lot but never write are particularly susceptible to the baseless confidence in our writing that the author is referring to.
So yes, I agree with you PJ – read a lot of books, but don’t think that doing so will magically make you a good writer.”
Yes, when you finally learn to write, all the unremembered phrases and long-forgotten words should come to the surface like nutrients from the deep dirt.
PJ Brunet
8 Aug 11 at 4:18 pm
@PJ Ha, I like that theory – reading is like an investment where learning to write is akin to withdrawing your deposits. Hope you’re right!
James Sanders
8 Aug 11 at 4:41 pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphrys_law
Xaprb
8 Aug 11 at 6:06 pm
Hacker News picked this article up, and there is a lively discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2860861, so this site might have some database problems. It’s hosted on a shared hosting provider. I don’t make money from this blog, so don’t expect it to take a HN link gracefully.
Xaprb
8 Aug 11 at 6:34 pm
Just blog.
Tony
8 Aug 11 at 8:12 pm
Totally agree with you on this. Communication skills do play a very important role for anybody in the tech field. Its not only related to tech field but also helps develop a good personality for one self.
Praveen
9 Aug 11 at 2:01 am
Well said, Baron. I couldn’t agree more. Communicating well is
a *requirement* for good engineering. This is why we’ve been giving ops job candidates some open-ended questions, to be answered in paragraph form.
John Allspaw
9 Aug 11 at 5:38 am
Didn’t you learn to write/read in school already. CS students, learn to pay attention in school.
sygeek
9 Aug 11 at 5:48 am
Communicate and do well, many projects fail for this.
Errant
9 Aug 11 at 6:05 am
We were recently forced by a reviewer and editor of a food science journal to switch the entire article to passive voice. Apparently, they feel it does not sound “scientific” if you write “We studied…”. Sad, but true.
Jan
9 Aug 11 at 6:28 am
Found this list of writing tips useful:
http://chronicle.com/article/10-Tips-on-How-to-Write-Less/124268/
Sean
9 Aug 11 at 6:35 am
Hi!
Really nice and refreshing post, thanks! There’s one particular thing I’d like to comment on:
“It is about the structure and process of the thought that created the writing”
I agree, but it’s part of the hard work – certainly a pre-requisite, but not the final goal. Where this represents the substance of the message, successful communication also requires its delivery. You could call it “style”: matters of flow, mood, and pace. I don’t pretend I have a recipe for it, but the obvious factors that influence it are the audience and the context wherein you place your message.
In my attempts to write a piece toward a specific audience, I found there is a bunch of competing properties. Coincidentally I always end up with a list of C-words: clarity, completeness, concreteness, coherence, consistency. (I could add comprehensive and concise, but I think those are actually a consequence of mixing these 5).
Assuming one agrees these 5 things are always desirable, there’s a lot to be said about how these things work against each other – a bit more than I can reasonably leave here in a comment. Perhaps I should write that down in blog of my own sometime … :-)
Roland Bouman
9 Aug 11 at 7:00 am
“I don’t make money from this blog, so don’t expect it to take a HN link gracefully.”
Throw up a banner in the right spot, get a VPS and maybe your blog income surpasses your other income. No doubt you have authority in the search engines for $20/click keyword phrases.
PJ Brunet
9 Aug 11 at 3:20 pm
@PJ: I feel that when you accept advertising on your site, it limits your freedom of speech and can cause a perception of bias when touchy subjects come up. I suspect Baron has similar reasoning.
Also, it just feels icky. :-P
Tim McCormack
20 Aug 11 at 12:28 pm
Icky. Yes.
Xaprb
20 Aug 11 at 5:26 pm
I’d like to take your thought one step further, Barron. Written communication lacks facial expression and the rest of body language in its delivery; I think there’s more chance for misinterpretation in the written word as compared to the spoken word.
Jeremy
21 Oct 11 at 10:48 am