The title of this blog says it all. It is a deep truth of fundamental importance in every profession. I have always tried hard to convince students of this fact.
Explaining things clearly and correctly, whether in written or in spoken form, is hard. It takes a lot of time and experience. Most importantly, some people may have more innate talent. Others may have fewer.
However, the first step is to convince oneself of the importance of this fact. Otherwise, the battle is lost before it has begun.
I have come to believe that many students have a problem in this respect, as they do not realize how important it is to be clear and correct in our own language. They either believe that technical skills are all that is needed, or that they will magically become perfectly understandable to everyone at some unspecified point in the future. This is definitely not the case. Consequently, they will encounter many unexpected and challenging obstacles in their professional careers.
Writing correctly is instead much easier. It just requires spending a little more time before hitting 'send', perhaps using an automatic proofreading tool. By "writing correctly" I merely mean writing without making a lot of typing or basic grammar mistakes: everyone makes mistakes, myself included; but a high density of mistakes has a clear implicit meaning "I care so little about this message and about you, the person who will read it, that I didn't even check it carefully". I have come to believe that many students do have a problem in this respect as well, which will create more and more obstacles for them.
Since those that will read this blog post will think "Ufff... this boring old person who only knows the academic world...", I hope they will find the opinion of the co-founder of Stack Overflow, that was also the founder of Trello and that worked for four years as Program Manager in Microsoft Excel, more convincing than mine.
Years of experience working with programmers have taught me that programmers who can communicate their ideas clearly are going to be far, far more effective than programmers who can only really communicate well with the compiler.
It is crucial for documenting code, it is crucial for writing specifications and technical design documents that other people can review, and it’s crucial even for those meetings where you sit around discussing how to do something best: brilliant programmers who have trouble explaining their ideas just can’t make as much of a contribution.
We usually completely disqualify resumes that are full of English mistakes. It’s not that hard, even for a non-native speaker, to find someone to check your resume, and failure to do that usually reflects a profound lack of concern over the quality of the things that you do.
Sorting Resumes – Joel on Software
(Yes, it's a blog post from almost 20 years ago, but the truth of certain things never changes).
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