Jeff Dickey
Sep 2, 2018 · 1 min read

Writing is a necessary but not sufficient skill.

The true lost art in software development is copy editing; the next time I read about a group of people who say they’re going to put their crap over there and mix the words up, I’m going to reach through the interwebs and slap someone silly with a saguaro cactus.

Seriously, people: you knew this stuff when you were in seventh grade, or else you wouldn’t have made it to eighth grade. Nothing jars me out of an article about a topic I’m interested in, written by someone who clearly has invested time and effort into learning the material, when it’s so poorly written that I can barely decode the English-like writing.

Also, a tip I picked up from a TA whose thankless task it was to review the submissions that I and 22 other students in a fiction-writing class turned in every week: Write to a length. More specifically, write to 10–15% more than the length specified for the piece you’re writing, and edit down. Never edit up; people can tell when you’re inserting words and phrases, let alone paragraphs, just to get the word count to spec.

Jeff Dickey

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Writer. Gentleman Historian. Chief Engineer at a wantrapreneurial Web “startup”.