Ask HN: Am I the only one hurt by lack of writing skills?
As I've been advancing in my career, I've realized that my writing skills are pretty terrible. This has become even more obvious as I've been trying to become a staff engineer, since I have to write more emails, communicate more, connect teams, talk to higher level managers, influence people, and deal with office politics.
I've tried a few apps to help with my writing, like Grammarly, but I find that their suggestions are usually pretty minor and don't really help with the overall structure or clarity of my messages.
I've seen a few similar posts here and it seems like this is a common issue, especially for non-native speakers like me.
So, in the last couple of months, I've been working on this AI-powered app that can fix my grammar and give me better suggestions for improving my writing.
Aaand… I’m here to validate it! What do you think? Is this a good idea to pursue? Would you be interested in paying for something like this? I'm open to any feedback or criticism.
Note: The above text was reviewed and adjusted with my app.
56 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadTo achieve that will probably take a human being looking at examples of your writing and telling you what went wrong. Usually, there is some kind of mistake you will be making again and again. If it's a grammar problem, you need to have someone teach you the rules in way that you can apply consistently to every new sentence. And I don't mean all the rules because obviously you know lots of them. But you probably need a human to hammer in the ones that you're having problems with.
Even more likely than grammar is that you might be having problems conveying your meaning in a concise and compelling way. This is an art as much as a science and will also probably take human tutoring to improve. I love writing[0] myself and I'm elated to see that you want to improve. If it would be of help to you, contact me at the info in my profile and I'd be happy to read a few of your things and spend some time on a Zoom call helping you out, gratis.
[0] https://medium.com/@mimixco
To evaluate your app we have to see how it performs. We know people benefit from spelling checking and systems like grammarly, if you can make something that is better enough than you can replace those things.
If you aren’t ready to put it up for a public demo I suggest you make a video demo.
For structure a hack I've found is to write things out as verbosely as I can, then cut words and sentence that add little to no value.
When I do that I tend to end up with something that doesn't sound rambley while still fully conveying what I'm trying to say.
In terms of style though I have no tips. I find my writing tends to be very dry, but I'm uninteresting and monotone when I speak (autism), so maybe that's just a reflection of my personality.
It might help to look at it in reverse to see the problem with your approach. Imagine someone with a degree in journalism saying, "I need to improve my coding skills" and going out and writing a blog post about coding instead of doing any actual coding.
That is not to say you should remain stagnant and not try to improve though.
Many have suggested you take up some form of writing to improve but IME reading high-quality text (newspaper articles, classic literature books) is a more efficient way that will help you imitate the caliber of native speakers in the long term.
This should help you get better at writing. Writing was my weakest subject in school.
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Would not be interested in paying for the app. Current models summarize well, and can rewrite for tone too. But clear technical communication requires understanding the underlying logic, which LLMs haven’t quite cracked yet.
Another helpful book is A Rulebook for Arguments by Anthony Weston. It focuses more on the organization of your thoughts before you start writing. When writing about more complex topics, I frequently find myself discovering what I want to say as I'm writing, which makes for a lot of re-organizing and re-writing and wasted time. By slapping together an outline of what I want to write before I get started, I can identify what I want to say--and the optimal order in which to say it--before putting pen to paper.
My ideal tool is one that focuses on the input, rather than the output. A tool that accepts input as the units of information I want to communicate, priority ordered and linked by relationships, and the tool turns that into a narrative journey for humans to enjoy. I don't want a tool to tell me my colon should be a comma, or my phrasing is redundant, I want a tool to output the best written way to communicate information for the audience.
I would say you (or your app) have a ways to go yet.
This post is actually about validating a business idea, but that portion of the post is pretty much a byline.
A computer is never going to read your mind and understand the idea(s) you are trying to convey. (Caveat "640k is enough for anybody...")
I am not convinced your problem is language/spelling/grammar. You are reducing communication to a protocol when it is so much more.
This message would be lost in a busy business world, which again suggest that the AI doesn't work and the problem lies elsewhere. My experience is as follows: open with the most important part first, then continue with the why. Almost nobody has time to read the finer print in the bottom of an email.
"As I advance my career, I find my writing skills horrible. I started feeling the pain even more as an aspiring staff engineer.
Now I need to write way more emails, communicate more, connect teams, engage with higher level managers, influence people, play politics etc.
Since feeling this pain, I tried a few apps, and my last one was Grammarly. I've found their suggestions to be very minor. I was looking for a solution that can check entire message correctness, clearity and suggest ways to improve the overall structure.
Searching for this problem, I found a few similar posts here and it seems like it is a shared concern, especially for the non native speakers like me. Which brought me to this experiment of writing an app powered by AI that can correct my grammar and improve suggestions.
What do you all think? Is it a valid idea? Would you pay to have access to this tool? Please give me your feedback and let’s debate. Don't go easy on me, critics are all I'm asking."
Curious to hear your feedback about the result from the above original input. AI response gave me pretty much the final version of my post, I think I just inserted this: "Aaand… I’m here to validate it!" and the footprint "Note:". And by the last sentence do you mean the note? (Could you please state how a native speaker would write it?)
My suggestion is to assign to yourself a research topic and write a paper just as you would if submitting it to a refereed journal. Pick something you already know about (or know a lot about).
I am biased - I have a strong academic background and published journal articles, meeting abstracts, and the like - but the outline of title, abstract, introduction, methods, results, analysis, and conclusions provides structure and will help guide you through the process. If you want to be surgical about it, include citations and a bibliography.
What happens next? Find a "reviewer" and tell them to red-ink the hell out of your paper. Make the edits and resubmit it until the reviewer is happy. If you can, gently impose on a friend/coworker who in your estimation is a good writer and has better writing skills than you do. This might cost you a few coffees/beers/pizzas but it will be worth it.
I think it's great OP decided to build a product to help them with this. It shows two great programmer virtues: impatience and laziness. And by posting it here, they can certainly bask in a bit of hubris as well. :)
Don't you agree?
Would you say the same for finding a solution to your problem in StackOverflow? My argument is that you will always learn from adapting to your situation. And on copilot I think it's the same thing, but now you are finding your solution way faster.
It's not like in the videos example case where you are passively watching something. No, you read the suggested code, execute your code, look for bugs, test it etc. Then you move on to the next step of your coding task or whatever.
I believe the same reliance on Stack Overflow or Google for the most basic answers make people lazy and more impatient. This cheats people out of the process where you typically have these insights for wisdom. The AI also will not get "better" because it's capped at our collective understanding. Which fewer and fewer people will even contribute towards due to new AI-assisted habits.
Only time will tell if it makes people "better". There's no doubt it will be helpful and useful in many settings, especially in education. But this over-reliance makes you only as good as your tool. Which is what my original comment was trying to say.
Actually I think it might be the best way to learn, because it'll teach you to write well in contexts that are relevant to you. Someone suggested reading fiction from good authors, but that'll teach you to write good fiction, not engineering emails. The skills might be transferable to some degree, since it is rather similar, but it's not the same thing!
Kudos on this idea, and I'd definitely pay for it if it works well enough!
OTOH, I understand the criticism too. Maybe I was not clear in my message, but of course the idea is not replace 100% of a person's writing with a generated AI blurb.
But more like an assistant, where the user can see more ways that the message can be expressed more fluidly and adapt as needed. And BIG YES, hopefully, by using the app, seeing suggestions repeatedly, practicing more, learning more and becoming a better writer in the process!
I can't see the market for this, especially with ChatGPT, but then again.. Grammerly exists.
Why you want to make another tool? How it's different?
For written communications, you can keep it short and point people's attention to a linked issue ticket, or a shared doc with the technical requirements. It is OK to keep emails short and let the recipient follow up if they have questions.
I find that communicating is a lot easier if both sides are on the same page more or less on what needs to be done. That's where organized documentation can help.
I do more writing English these days than I do writing code and I'm here to say that writing is labor, just like coding is labor. The more you do it, the better you get. There are no shortcuts.
I wouldn't be surprised if, within a few months or years, we all develop a reasonably solid ability to recognize AI generated text (in much the same way that the special effects that looked great in movies 30 years ago look pretty goofy today). But it seems that even before we reach that point, AI is already pretty good at recognizing its own.