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Comment by dimator | Hacker News Reader

No one has ever cared of you're good at writing essays in the future, that was true 50 years ago.

The point of writing an essay was to (imo) get good at writing (actually assembling words cogently), thinking about a cohesive viewpoint/argument, and understanding the source material (book, novel, historical event, political concept, whatever).

I'm

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I tend to think of any substantial writing we do at work as an essay. Proposal, summary, RFC, employee evaluation, whatever. You can tell who writes well, and who is copy/pasting plausibly relevant text into an unedited draft that they then pass off as the final result. Not AI, just sloppy writing. I don't have numbers to back it, but I think that the good writing gets more done in less time. So, people care if you're good at writing essays.

Then there's the whole "clear writing is clear thinking" angle, but I suspect that people who write poorly do so out of laziness rather than any deficiency.

I want to work with people who can communicate thoughts effectively and will write some damn documentation.

People who whine about writing being difficult or unimportant are going to be deficient in both.

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