4 ms·

I used to think like that (being the kid that wrote well in school). But now I'm not so sure anymore... Been humbled too many times by people much, much smart

I used to think like that (being the kid that wrote well in school). But now I'm not so sure anymore... Been humbled too many times by people much, much smarter than me that wrote in smsesque. Have read too many apparently well-written texts that are nothing but bullshit written by ignorants.

tombert 7y ago
Oh, most of my coworkers are smarter than me, so I'm certainly not trying to make an assessment on their IQ or any nonsense like that. That said, I do think that writing smsesque (which I am going to steal for the future because I had never heard that term before) is a really good way to make yourself look dumber, especially to non-engineers. Even if my long and rambling writings lack substance, they still typically give the optics of someone who is smart. Is that the way it should be? Probably not, but I don't make the rules.
- enriquto 7y ago
  > I do think that writing smsesque (...) is a really good way to make yourself look dumber, especially to non-engineers. Maybe they do that in purpose, then?. They do not need to be admired by everybody, especially not by non-engineers. Like the very rich people who dress extremely humbly, with torn-down clothes.
  - asark 7y ago
    Yup. Anti-signal-signals are a thing. "I don't want or need to care how hard it is for you to understand me, so I'm not going to give any thought or effort to making it easier for you" is certainly a kind of signal.
    - sixstringtheory 7y ago
      The signal I get from that is arrogance, then. Also, in an industry where “fake it till you make it” is the rallying cry, one shouldn’t appear dumb, lest one actually becomes dumb (at least in the eyes of their colleagues/superiors/reports/clients).
      - rootusrootus 7y ago
        Exactly what came to my mind as well. A lack of care when you write can signal that you do not know how to write well, or it can signal that you don't care to write well. Neither of these are signals I want to send, both harm my reputation.
        TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
        It can also be a signal that you're too busy to write well in that context. There are two elements to writing well. One is the efficient communication of content. The other is communication of social register, relative status, and power relationships. Hitting the right social register is an impedance matching problem that depends on the target audience. If you go too high you risk sounding snobby, pretentious, and condescending. If you go too low you won't be credible. People often assume this means that if you lard your verbiage with orotund circumlocutions and vague implications you'll be hitting those high register top notes. But in fact social register doesn't map neatly to grammar/reading age/vocab. SMSspeak in an email can - ironically - hit too high a social register because you're implying you don't have time to write a more detailed and conversational response, and you're not making the conversation a priority. This is orthogonal to any actionable message content.
      - finder83 7y ago
        This may not apply as much to written language, but there are benefits at times to pretending to be more ignorant or dumb than you actually are. My father was actually a master at this. He was brilliant in his own ways (not the academic sense, but mechanically and socially brilliant), but had the persona of the "dumb hick" down completely. People would underestimate him, sometimes try to take advantage of him, then he would gently show his competence and they would quickly backtrack and essentially give him whatever he wanted. It's obviously manipulative, but was often a way of catching people in their own trap. Think car dealers trying to cheat him, salesmen, etc. I just can't pull it off as well without seeming fake. I'm not sure there is validity to either appearing smarter than you are or dumber on a regular basis though, particularly with people you work with. Integrity is a much more important attribute to me in coworkers and employees than either feigned competence or feigned humility. Genuine competence or genuine humility are different matters though of course.
  - Crinus 7y ago
    No they do not. I've seen a LOT of smsesque text that come from all sorts of different people who i'm 100% they are not trying to "appear dumber". I do not know why people do it, so i assume laziness. Smart people can be lazy too.
    - sjg007 7y ago
      Soon we will be writing in emojis.
    - pests 7y ago
      In the end all writing or speech is about communicating an idea. My opinion is these people have learned it doesn't matter. If an idea can be conveyed in smsesque and still get the point across while being quicker to write, then why not? I have a feeling power/authority/expert status matters here because the listeners will power through unclear communication just to gleam a glimpse of the underlying idea from this idol.
      - blondin 7y ago
        exactly! i am reading all these replies and i found them really interesting. i think the same people being annoyed by sms-like writing, would get mad at me not using proper casing with my sentences. at the end of the day, i think it does not matter. i am not writing a book or an article. and when i am texting, i would rather keep it short, sms-like. i would like to understand, truly, why people get mad at such things. it has nothing to do with being disrespectful or anything. last time someone was mad at a particular emoji. i believe it's the next form of shortening messages. and guess what? i would rather have an emoji than type a sms-like message. maybe some of us just like being efficient?
        NateEag 7y ago
        Emoji are a terrible insult to the written word. They're also an affront to imagery. Standard images, at least, are the same image everywhere. A grid of pixels is a grid of pixels. Emoji, however, vary from platform to platform, so what you pick may well not be what your reader sees. In some cases that may matter, in others it may not. Furthermore, some people construct new meanings and usages for emoji that do not align with the actual descriptions from the Unicode standard. You'll only realize this if they tell you, of course. I had one of those moments with my wife a few weeks ago. I'm still (irrationally) upset that emoji are in Unicode. They're ambiguous, ill-defined, and they are certainly not characters in the multilingual support sense of the word. Do I use them? Yes, grudgingly, and I hate myself a little bit every time I do it.
  - tombert 7y ago
    If that's the case then it's kind of mean, isn't it? They know that I'm a grown-up, and are writing to me like a child, effectively talking down to people. No one is going to give you major adoration for using the word "you" instead of "u", or "are" instead of "r", so I sincerely doubt they're doing it as some sort of humbling thing.
  - the_af 7y ago
    My experience is that it's not on purpose and it's not signalling of any kind. First, let me be clear: I'm lucky that I'm surrounded by smarter people than me. Almost all of my coworkers are incredibly intelligent people, can troubleshoot and code circles around me, and understand teamwork and building reliable software way better than me. It's a great situation to be in, because I have plenty to learn from them. Unfortunately, they don't write very well in their native language (which is not English, by the way). They always ask me to proof read what they wrote. Full of typos and unclear sentences. They also seem to be less well-read than me. Many don't read fiction at all; if they read anything, it's mostly books on tech. It's like their brain power is directed at other pursuits, and as a consequence their writing skill suffers.
- pmontra 7y ago
  I agree. We can write smsque in a slack channel and "its ok", but it's not OK to write like that in a document sent to customers, in a wiki that explains how a piece of software works and will stay there for years or in an email aimed at winning an argument. Those would be detrimental to the company and to the developer.
- sjg007 7y ago
  Don't write long, rambling, run on sentences, they confuse the reader. As a side note... it is always fun to read pro/con paragraphs for ballot measures and even Congressional legislation... they are masters at expert ambiguity.
asark 7y ago
Writing well doesn't mean you're smart, it just means you've put some effort into writing well. It's an exercise in empathy and consideration for one's readers, and crafting tolerable sentences with reasonably-normal usage is just the start of it. Ensuring you're writing something worth reading, with every sentence and every word, is another. "Bullshit written by ignorants" tautologically falls short of that, however fit their writing is otherwise.
ErrantX 7y ago
I think, in my experience, that there is a middle way which Ive seen the very best use (and try to follow). Fundamentally it is not about how much you write but how well you communicate. There is a difference in people that rattle off sms-style one liners every time, and those who know they only need one line to communicate fully. My experience is; the former style almost always leads to an email chain where one party steadily extracts information from the other, like pulling teeth
- Veen 7y ago
  Yes, it takes a little thought to write clearly and present the pertinent information, but it's plain bad manners to do otherwise.
_jal 7y ago
Limiting this to written technical discussions, I don't get uptight about misspellings, typos or grammar errors, so long as I can unambiguously parse what they want to say. What bothers me is that txtspk is almost always unclear and frustrating. That tends to lead me to try to find folks who do write clearly, just for efficiency. I will say that I do judge on written proficiency. Again, I don't care that much about form (although in more formal writing, mistakes are signals), I care about clarity of thought and ability to convey relevant information. Completely apart from interpersonal factors, programmers who can't write in a human language tend to be bad at writing in artificial ones.
draw_down 7y ago
Yes, same here. Ultimately what matters is ideas and concepts, not their particular mode of expression. And certainly, taking someone’s ability/inability to write as a general sign of their intelligence or empathy or level of talent is a mistake.
justin66 7y ago
> Been humbled too many times by people much, much smarter than me that wrote in smsesque. Have read too many apparently well-written texts that are nothing but bullshit written by ignorants. I cannot imagine why you found them humbling. Ignorance or lack of skill are forgivable, but poor writing by someone who could do better but just doesn't care about their output or their audience is just lazy. If someone who could do better cannot be trusted with something as simple as writing a coherent message, why would you trust them with anything else?
- gdy 7y ago
  Because they consistently deliver
- enriquto 7y ago
  > I cannot imagine why you found them humbling. Because they were humbling to me and I learned a lot from them, despite their clumsy writing style (not because of their writing style!). Imagine that you have worked several weeks on a problem, you are very proud of the code that you created that solves the problem elegantly; you document it with well-written, correctly punctuated comments and documentation. Then the smspeaker looks over your shoulder and says "dude, this data structure isn't necessary here, just use a table of integers and it will be faster and the code 80% shorter", which is a self-evident statement after the fact. THAT is humbling, regardless of whether the guy writes his mails in correct english or smsesque.

tombert 7y ago

Oh, most of my coworkers are smarter than me, so I'm certainly not trying to make an assessment on their IQ or any nonsense like that. That said, I do think that writing smsesque (which I am going to steal for the future because I had never heard that term before) is a really good way to make yourself look dumber, especially to non-engineers. Even if my long and rambling writings lack substance, they still typically give the optics of someone who is smart. Is that the way it should be? Probably not, but I don't make the rules.

enriquto 7y ago
> I do think that writing smsesque (...) is a really good way to make yourself look dumber, especially to non-engineers. Maybe they do that in purpose, then?. They do not need to be admired by everybody, especially not by non-engineers. Like the very rich people who dress extremely humbly, with torn-down clothes.
- asark 7y ago
  Yup. Anti-signal-signals are a thing. "I don't want or need to care how hard it is for you to understand me, so I'm not going to give any thought or effort to making it easier for you" is certainly a kind of signal.
  - sixstringtheory 7y ago
    The signal I get from that is arrogance, then. Also, in an industry where “fake it till you make it” is the rallying cry, one shouldn’t appear dumb, lest one actually becomes dumb (at least in the eyes of their colleagues/superiors/reports/clients).
    - rootusrootus 7y ago
      Exactly what came to my mind as well. A lack of care when you write can signal that you do not know how to write well, or it can signal that you don't care to write well. Neither of these are signals I want to send, both harm my reputation.
      - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
        It can also be a signal that you're too busy to write well in that context. There are two elements to writing well. One is the efficient communication of content. The other is communication of social register, relative status, and power relationships. Hitting the right social register is an impedance matching problem that depends on the target audience. If you go too high you risk sounding snobby, pretentious, and condescending. If you go too low you won't be credible. People often assume this means that if you lard your verbiage with orotund circumlocutions and vague implications you'll be hitting those high register top notes. But in fact social register doesn't map neatly to grammar/reading age/vocab. SMSspeak in an email can - ironically - hit too high a social register because you're implying you don't have time to write a more detailed and conversational response, and you're not making the conversation a priority. This is orthogonal to any actionable message content.
    - finder83 7y ago
      This may not apply as much to written language, but there are benefits at times to pretending to be more ignorant or dumb than you actually are. My father was actually a master at this. He was brilliant in his own ways (not the academic sense, but mechanically and socially brilliant), but had the persona of the "dumb hick" down completely. People would underestimate him, sometimes try to take advantage of him, then he would gently show his competence and they would quickly backtrack and essentially give him whatever he wanted. It's obviously manipulative, but was often a way of catching people in their own trap. Think car dealers trying to cheat him, salesmen, etc. I just can't pull it off as well without seeming fake. I'm not sure there is validity to either appearing smarter than you are or dumber on a regular basis though, particularly with people you work with. Integrity is a much more important attribute to me in coworkers and employees than either feigned competence or feigned humility. Genuine competence or genuine humility are different matters though of course.
- Crinus 7y ago
  No they do not. I've seen a LOT of smsesque text that come from all sorts of different people who i'm 100% they are not trying to "appear dumber". I do not know why people do it, so i assume laziness. Smart people can be lazy too.
  - sjg007 7y ago
    Soon we will be writing in emojis.
  - pests 7y ago
    In the end all writing or speech is about communicating an idea. My opinion is these people have learned it doesn't matter. If an idea can be conveyed in smsesque and still get the point across while being quicker to write, then why not? I have a feeling power/authority/expert status matters here because the listeners will power through unclear communication just to gleam a glimpse of the underlying idea from this idol.
    - blondin 7y ago
      exactly! i am reading all these replies and i found them really interesting. i think the same people being annoyed by sms-like writing, would get mad at me not using proper casing with my sentences. at the end of the day, i think it does not matter. i am not writing a book or an article. and when i am texting, i would rather keep it short, sms-like. i would like to understand, truly, why people get mad at such things. it has nothing to do with being disrespectful or anything. last time someone was mad at a particular emoji. i believe it's the next form of shortening messages. and guess what? i would rather have an emoji than type a sms-like message. maybe some of us just like being efficient?
      - NateEag 7y ago
        Emoji are a terrible insult to the written word. They're also an affront to imagery. Standard images, at least, are the same image everywhere. A grid of pixels is a grid of pixels. Emoji, however, vary from platform to platform, so what you pick may well not be what your reader sees. In some cases that may matter, in others it may not. Furthermore, some people construct new meanings and usages for emoji that do not align with the actual descriptions from the Unicode standard. You'll only realize this if they tell you, of course. I had one of those moments with my wife a few weeks ago. I'm still (irrationally) upset that emoji are in Unicode. They're ambiguous, ill-defined, and they are certainly not characters in the multilingual support sense of the word. Do I use them? Yes, grudgingly, and I hate myself a little bit every time I do it.
- tombert 7y ago
  If that's the case then it's kind of mean, isn't it? They know that I'm a grown-up, and are writing to me like a child, effectively talking down to people. No one is going to give you major adoration for using the word "you" instead of "u", or "are" instead of "r", so I sincerely doubt they're doing it as some sort of humbling thing.
- the_af 7y ago
  My experience is that it's not on purpose and it's not signalling of any kind. First, let me be clear: I'm lucky that I'm surrounded by smarter people than me. Almost all of my coworkers are incredibly intelligent people, can troubleshoot and code circles around me, and understand teamwork and building reliable software way better than me. It's a great situation to be in, because I have plenty to learn from them. Unfortunately, they don't write very well in their native language (which is not English, by the way). They always ask me to proof read what they wrote. Full of typos and unclear sentences. They also seem to be less well-read than me. Many don't read fiction at all; if they read anything, it's mostly books on tech. It's like their brain power is directed at other pursuits, and as a consequence their writing skill suffers.
pmontra 7y ago
I agree. We can write smsque in a slack channel and "its ok", but it's not OK to write like that in a document sent to customers, in a wiki that explains how a piece of software works and will stay there for years or in an email aimed at winning an argument. Those would be detrimental to the company and to the developer.
sjg007 7y ago
Don't write long, rambling, run on sentences, they confuse the reader. As a side note... it is always fun to read pro/con paragraphs for ballot measures and even Congressional legislation... they are masters at expert ambiguity.

asark 7y ago

Writing well doesn't mean you're smart, it just means you've put some effort into writing well. It's an exercise in empathy and consideration for one's readers, and crafting tolerable sentences with reasonably-normal usage is just the start of it. Ensuring you're writing something worth reading, with every sentence and every word, is another. "Bullshit written by ignorants" tautologically falls short of that, however fit their writing is otherwise.

ErrantX 7y ago

I think, in my experience, that there is a middle way which Ive seen the very best use (and try to follow). Fundamentally it is not about how much you write but how well you communicate. There is a difference in people that rattle off sms-style one liners every time, and those who know they only need one line to communicate fully. My experience is; the former style almost always leads to an email chain where one party steadily extracts information from the other, like pulling teeth

Veen 7y ago
Yes, it takes a little thought to write clearly and present the pertinent information, but it's plain bad manners to do otherwise.

_jal 7y ago

Limiting this to written technical discussions, I don't get uptight about misspellings, typos or grammar errors, so long as I can unambiguously parse what they want to say. What bothers me is that txtspk is almost always unclear and frustrating. That tends to lead me to try to find folks who do write clearly, just for efficiency. I will say that I do judge on written proficiency. Again, I don't care that much about form (although in more formal writing, mistakes are signals), I care about clarity of thought and ability to convey relevant information. Completely apart from interpersonal factors, programmers who can't write in a human language tend to be bad at writing in artificial ones.

draw_down 7y ago

Yes, same here. Ultimately what matters is ideas and concepts, not their particular mode of expression. And certainly, taking someone’s ability/inability to write as a general sign of their intelligence or empathy or level of talent is a mistake.

justin66 7y ago

> Been humbled too many times by people much, much smarter than me that wrote in smsesque. Have read too many apparently well-written texts that are nothing but bullshit written by ignorants. I cannot imagine why you found them humbling. Ignorance or lack of skill are forgivable, but poor writing by someone who could do better but just doesn't care about their output or their audience is just lazy. If someone who could do better cannot be trusted with something as simple as writing a coherent message, why would you trust them with anything else?

gdy 7y ago
Because they consistently deliver
enriquto 7y ago
> I cannot imagine why you found them humbling. Because they were humbling to me and I learned a lot from them, despite their clumsy writing style (not because of their writing style!). Imagine that you have worked several weeks on a problem, you are very proud of the code that you created that solves the problem elegantly; you document it with well-written, correctly punctuated comments and documentation. Then the smspeaker looks over your shoulder and says "dude, this data structure isn't necessary here, just use a table of integers and it will be faster and the code 80% shorter", which is a self-evident statement after the fact. THAT is humbling, regardless of whether the guy writes his mails in correct english or smsesque.