Writing
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- Writing by hand is still the best way to retain information
- headbee: I can attest to this and took all of my notes on paper in college. However, once I started a real job I realized that this strategy doesn't scale to all situations. In college, I needed to be able to recall all of the information I had ingested: it was low-write, high-read. In the workplace, there's much more information, but I'm unlikely to need most of it: it's high-write, low-read. I need to be able to reference the information, but not necessarily recall it. Taking paper notes became too much of a burden and I moved to a wiki of markdown notes.
- How to draw ideas
When ideas are still in their infancy—for example here I am not 100% sure we should go with the pot rings and want to discuss the idea with fellow designers—I recommend a very simple format:- one headline
- one image
- one written sentence
- Why Engineers Need To Write
Writing for a child forces me to keep the words and concepts very, very simple, and to write in a style that builds up usage of the program from first principles. Writing for the grumpy old-timer is a practice in minimizing questions from them, forcing me to do a sort of final pass on the overall design of what I'm writing about, to defend design choices, and to add future improvements to the backlog. Drafting the documentation for semi-finished features that are still in progress has sometimes led me to change the design in order to make writing the docs targeting these two people simpler.
— albrewer - How to think in writing: Part 1: The thought behind the thought
If your goal is to probe the validity of your thoughts, this is painfully inefficient. You'll get much further if you do one or two simple passes on your writing, and then pass what you've written around and ask for feedback. — BeetieB
Children