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Comment by sitkack | Hacker News Reader

I was just talking with a friend of mine that teaches writing at a university and the dean wants to focus on STEM, so much so that they are considering drastically cutting back the english department.

This is a huge mistake.

Efficient and succinct communication of ideas as expressed in writing transcends all boundaries. Many of the best programmers I have known were equally as skilled writing an essay as decomposing a problem into functions. An essay can be lyrical and it can also be computational. The lack of clarity in writing, in general, is the cause of bad code. This crushingly intense focus on STEM is shortsighted. The root of the problem is a lack of clarity of writing, both in english and in code.

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> This crushingly intense focus on STEM is shortsighted. The root of the problem is a lack of clarity of writing, both in english and in code.

I think lack of clarity in writing -- either in code or in natural language -- isn't the root of the problem, its a symptom of a lack of good, clear general analytical process. Lots of programmers I've met are great at analyzing how to implement a very explicitly described thing in code, but aren't great at analyzing domain information to determine how to solve a problem.

I don't think that STEM-focused education is bad for this, but I think that developing generalized analytic skills seems to be helped by having experience applying analysis in varied and not-closely-related contexts, particularly contexts where the problems are often fuzzily defined and you need to do work to discover, or impose, structured order to compose a response.

Collegiate English departments can be an important venue for that, but I don't think uniquely so -- so can Philosophy or social sciences departments. (But its all highly dependent on the particular institution, professor, and courses chosen.) I'm personally partial to legal writing, specifically (often addressed in undergraduate coursework in law-focussed political science courses) as a vehicle for developing this skill, but then I'm a programmer who's also a law geek, and who was a political science major, so, there's probably some bias there.

The best programmers I know are also great writers.

Not good, but great.

Their ability to organize ideas to write about them also serves their ability to organize ideas to code about them. I really think we give too little credit to analytical training available from English departments. I would train an English major as happily as a CS major, other factors being roughly similar.

Good writing is a vital skill for programmers. But are English departments any good at teaching it? None of the great writers I know have English degrees.

> None of the great writers I know have English degrees.

Off the top of my head: Tolkien and C.S. Lewis (the creators of Lord of the Rings and Narnia, respectively) were both Oxbridge professors of English.

> None of the great writers I know have English degrees.

Plenty of notable writers have English degrees; "None (or, equally, 'all', 'most', etc.) of the X that I know" usually introduces a statement that reveals more about the speaker's social bubble than the broader world.

One problem is that English departments often don't focus on efficient and succinct communication of ideas. Occasionally it seems as if they are focused on encouraging willful misinterpretation of another person's writing. I've had the experience of telling a teacher that I wanted to get better at writing technical documentation and being laughed at and told that was boring. Of course, these experiences aren't universal and certainly my memory of them suffers from selection bias. But so do the memories of other folks, leading them to be highly skeptical of the argument that the English department is a valuable way to provide students with skill in communicating clearly.

What kind of research do English departments do? It you're just looking at creative writing classes, then you're missing out on a lot of what is important for the state of the art of the field.

Agree. I took a non-STEM education then transitioned into coding and after many years I now find myself writing proposals, task specifications, and research reports. I increasingly conduct independent reviews of documents other people have written - not just the quality of the English, but primarily whether they expose us as a business to technical or commercial risk because they are confused or misleading.

And after many late nights fixing documents just before their due dates, I've developed some basic guidelines that aim to increase clarity, including: * Not using multiple distinct terms for the same thing in different parts of the document * making responsibilities clear - especially in multi-party contracts! E.g saying "X will do Y" rather than "Y will be done" * Not expecting the reader to guess what the writer means (e.g. by saying "there will be an impact") * Not using 'this' after a discussion that references multiple distinct things.

The results might not look like the sort of literature I enjoy reading outside work, but they have much more clarity!

Yesterday, I had the idea that I should try working as a technical writer as a way to realign my past with my future - I don't want the stress of debugging things every day, and I've done this writing informally and always thought, "I wish I could spend more time getting this right but I can't justify it."

An hour and a half later, I had started conversation with the maintainer of an open source project, speccing out a portfolio project with him. It's a bit early to tell, but treating the writing as my only goal, rather than as a supplement to coding work, is doing things to my perspective...there's definitely a need for the humanities in technical environments. A really great piece of writing can do more than instruct clearly, it can motivate creative uses, put the techniques into perspective and lead people away from dangerous ideas. As well, in-depth writing about technology is a great way to review its real utility and add discipline to development that has gone astray.

And there is so much technology that would benefit from doing this better. I think it might be the proper antidote to cargo culting.

I never thought about this but you're absolutely right, I've yet to see a great programmer who doesn't also write really well. This works both ways, too: sloppier programmers also tend to be sloppier writers.

Even if what you say about programming is true, that doesn't mean you need English majors.

You don't need CS majors either. You can write software as a hobby.

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