UChicago Social Sciences
15 HN recommenders · recommended in 15 months, 2019–2026
1:21:52 · 9.3M views · Jun 26, 2014
Larry McEnerney of the University of Chicago Writing Program gives a graduate-student session on writing effectively. His core idea is that readers care about value to them, not the writer's thinking process.
HN users repeatedly say it changed how they think about writing, calling it a masterclass useful far beyond academia.
20 comments from Hacker News
This reminds me of a talk I attended many years ago given by the director of UChicago's writing program (and found a recording of the talk [0]), and his thesis was that writing IS the process of thinking. That talk changed the way I write and made writing a primary tool I reach for when I want to learn something new. Words / language are the great technology we've made for representing ideas, and representing those ideas in the written word enables us to evaluate, edit, and compose those smaller ideas into bigger ideas. Kind of like how teachers would ask for an explanation in my own words, writing down my understanding of something I'd heard or read forced me to really evaluate the idea, focus on the parts I cared about, and record that understanding. Without the writing step, ideas would easily just float through my mind like a phantasm, shapeless and out of focus and useless when I had a tangible need for the idea. I am glad I learned to write (both code and text) long before Claude came online. It would have been very hard to struggle through translating ideas from my head into words and words (back) into ideas in my head if I knew there was an "Easy button" I could hit to get something cogent-sounding. I hope a large enough proportion of kids today will still put in the work and won't just end up with a stunted ability to write/think. [0] this video
This is something I'm just starting to understand after being an idealist/perfectionist for most of my life. YAGNI seemed like a shortsighted dogma. My colleague's design decisions looked like ugly hacks. I preferred something to be well-done than to be useful. According to my MBTI type, I was a perfectionist of idea, not a perfectionist of action/result. I was trying to build a cathedral, not a bazaar. I can attribute my ongoing transformation to a single video about effective writing: this video The main takeaway is that text is meant to be read, not written. Providing value to the reader is the only thing that matters. How well you write, how smart you sound, how much knowledge you deliver, doesn't matter as long as the reader gets value from the text. It sounds obvious, but it truly changed my perspective. I recommend this video to everyone.
Larry Mcenerney's lectures on how to write effectively are gold for getting better at writing. There's a lot packed in his lectures, but a big core idea is that you should use writing to help you do your thinking. With complex subject matter, writing is thinking. The thing that we've been taught is writing is more akin to publishing (i.e. the editing you do to share your thoughts with other people after you've finished writing and thinking for yourself). Link to snippets of his talk if you're short on time: [LINK] If you've got more time, you should watch the whole thing, it's a masterclass in understanding what writing actually is, and what it does for you: this video
If anybody likes this article and wants to know more about the process of writing effective PhD papers they should watch [1]. In fact, anybody who desires to improve their communication skills should watch it. It is so good that I would have paid to have access to this video! [1] this video
The resource that has spurred me into thinking differently about effective writing was shared on HN, from UChicago Social Sciences' Leadership Lab - The Craft of Writing Effectively. this video