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I don't know. I never graduated to waiter, but I worked as a busboy a few times. I have much sympathy for wait staff. My recollection is that the waitresses wer
by cafard 3y ago
I don't know. I never graduated to waiter, but I worked as a busboy a few times. I have much sympathy for wait staff. My recollection is that the waitresses were always decent to me.
Still I don't buy, "I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter." One of my other low-paying jobs was as a copy editor, and I have seen how commonly schools have failed to teach PhDs to be good writers--I don't see why the randomly selected waitress should be better. I should say that the demands of the two jobs are quite different, anyway: the waitress has to be able constantly switch attention to multiple people and multiple tasks, the writer (or programmer) has to be able to focus on one thing for relatively long times.
- PaulHoule 3y agoSchool actively teaches people to be bad writers.
- doodlesdev 3y agoHow so?
- chongli 3y agoBecause it prioritizes exercises that are easy for a teacher to mark over exercises that develop real writing skills. Everything is broken down into elementary mechanical tasks and marked with rubrics. Writing is taught as if it were mathematics, that you can just follow a simple algorithm and you are done! Turns out, neither great writing nor mathematics work that way. Both are very hard and require non intuitive leaps of inspiration.
- toast0 3y agoFollowing the algorithms for writing makes you neither a bad nor a good writer. If you learn and follow: tell them what you'll tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them; you writing will be formulaic and boring, but competent. If you do all the things, you'll be an ok writer.
- chongli 3y agoBoring writing is bad writing. If you can't holder your reader's attention long enough for them to get what you're trying to say then you've failed to communicate. If you follow that formula, not only will your writing be boring but too long as well.
- l33t233372 3y agoStep one, then, is to have something interesting to say. Unfortunately it isn’t generally the case that people have something interesting to write at length about, and even more rarely do they have something interesting to say about the specific topic assigned.
- PaulHoule 3y agoI struggled with a teacher in high school who expected me to write essays with a formula I could never really master, there might have been other things going on but a big one was that I read so much that I had so many examples to work from that her formula didn't make a lot of sense to me. Even though I struggled to get a "D" in her class I am certainly not a bad writer, I've made a living at times writing, I've written book chapters, blog posts, contracts, standards documents and all sorts of things. I struggled to master the language used in academic writing though.
- Swizec 3y agoThe biggest way school teaches bad writing is by asking for minimum word counts instead of maximum.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoI took a two-year course, where our homework was primarily focused on developing an essay at the end of each class (about 14 of them all told). All the classes had similar formats and requirements, and so all the essays also had maximum word counts. I really, really appreciated that, because it surely forced me to distill all my thoughts into the most essential passages and cut out the fat. Occasionally, I would be plagued by a bit of writer's block, and I couldn't think up enough to write, but eventually I could gin up enough logorrhea that I would have a nice tapestry to begin snipping out the wordy and irrelevant bits. And that was my favorite part about the classes, being able to write a really tight research/opinion paper every few weeks.
- teddyh 3y agoSee Larry McEnerney’s lecture The Craft of Writing Effectively: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM Essentially, students are, from the time they start school until they graduate, taught to write to an audience – teachers – who are both: 1. Paid to read it, and have no real possibility to stop reading because they get bored (teachers will read anything from beginning to end). 2. Looking for, in the writing, evidence that the student has learned the information. Neither of those two things are true of the rest of the world, when they are reading a book or an article by an aspiring professional writer. Therefore, writing to such an audience will require new skills which most people have never practiced.
- JohnFen 3y ago> Still I don't buy, "I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter." Yeah, I don't buy that either. I know that the best software engineering work I've done in my entire life happened when I was working as a hotel housekeeper, before I was programming professionally. It was because cleaning hotel rooms is a purely physical, and highly repetitive job. Every day at work, I was mentally "checked out", working on difficult programming problems in my head while my body just robotically did the work. Once I was programming professionally, I no longer had the luxury of spending so much time deeply thinking about programming problems.
- refulgentis 3y agoIs that an example of you: A) being a waitress learning to be a writer? B) an intellectual learning to be a waiter? I would have thought A, but you imply it's B. That's interesting to me, because when I was a waiter, I certainly didn't feel B. My high school classmate who went to Cornell and I spent an hour or two a day with senior year pretended they didn't remember me. Customers constantly talked down to me. I built an app to replace the restaurant computer, occasionally people would ask why I was taking orders on an iPod and when I'd explain, it made things _worse_: there was more than a handful of times they'd argue about rounding and the local tax rate. I think the author meant its _much_ harder to take the abusive management, extremely physical work, and occassional abusive customer when you think of yourself as an intellectual working a sidejob, as opposed to it being your job where the programming is a side passion.
- JohnFen 3y agoI meant it as "A", but on second thought, you're right, it's more like "B". I suppose that my real, underlying point is that you can't reliably tell what a person's skillset is by what they do for a living.
- cafard 3y agoI'd have said, Neither. Having worked briefly on cleaning crews, I believe that the work comes in larger and more predictable blocks than waiting tables does, and leaves one more time for thinking one's own thoughts. No, you can't tell about a person's skillset. I teach ESL, and have taught a. An employee of the the Brazilian national health department now cleaning houses in Montgomery County, Maryland. b. A Nicaraguan attorney now cleaning rooms for a Washington, DC, hotel. c. A Salvadoran archivist doing construction work here. And forty years ago, I caught a cab driven by a man from west Africa with a degree in urban planning, who had found it better for his health to leave his native country, where he was not well regarded by the government. And there are plenty of native-born Americans who are holding down jobs that are not commensurate with their skills or anyway potentials.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoI believe the point is not that it's easy to teach people to write well but that it's easier than teaching people to work hard.
- omginternets 3y agoEvery Ph.D I've met has been a very hard worker, on par with the people I worked with in the military.
- watwut 3y agoI never seen PhD as a program that is attempting to teach people write. There is absolutely no reason to expect someone with PhD to write better then other people.
- kd5bjo 3y agoIf anything, a PhD program teaches you how to write faster while maintaining an acceptable quality: Journal papers, conference presentations, and funding agency reports are all long-form writing projects that come up quite frequently and distract from the research (the fun part). Most of the value from this writing comes from it being accepted; improving quality beyond this level has rapidly diminshing returns.
- omginternets 3y agoMy writing definitely improved tenfold.
- Ekaros 3y agoWeirdly I have personally never considered PhD to be indicator of being particularly smart. Probably above median, but not special. On other hand it sure requires lot of work to be done. Or at least time spend.
- omginternets 3y agoThat tracks. I’d add that Ph.D. laureates tends to be people who like to pursue knowledge in depth. I think it’s this, combined with the work ethic and discipline, that make them excel in certain fields.
- ipaddr 3y agoEveryone learns to write in school. A waiting job most can pick up but not all. I couldn't get past serving training. Carrying four plates and keeping them straight takes without spilling is for others.
- cafard 3y agoEveryone writes in school, I assume. Not everyone learns to write well, in fact I suspect that most do not.
- nemo44x 3y ago> Everyone writes in school, I assume. Not true unfortunately. You would t believe how many illiterate or near illiterate kids are in high school.
- ghaff 3y agoI'm essentially a professional writer at this point. Certainly I learned a lot from technical courses in school and working professionally in technical roles but, at this point, a lot was writing for newspapers and other publications.
- RHSeeger 3y agoEveryone learns to carry plates while growing up. There's a lot more to being a good waiter than just writing down orders and carrying plates. And there's a lot more to being a good writer than just knowing how to write sentences.
- ipaddr 3y agoIf you can't carry the plates all of the other stuff stops mattering.. Good writer is a qualification that could mean millions or the top 5.
- caconym_ 3y ago> Everyone learns to write in school. This is like saying everyone learns math in school. It's technically correct, but only if you ignore the vast difference in skill between the average person and (e.g.) an accomplished novelist.
- projektfu 3y agoI'm not sure that schools teach the PhD track to be writers. They must write, but they are not really expected to write well. An MFA in creative writing, sure, but that's a different sort. I think of the modern or contemporary "intellectuals" I have read and many are mediocre writers. For every William James there's a Pearse or a Lewis who is hard to read. But I think that the author has a different idea in mind, that of the novelist, story writer or journalist. A lack of life experience and appreciation for dialog can lead to poor writing in these domains, and perhaps a waiter would have a leg up.
- tomcam 3y ago> I'm not sure that schools teach the PhD track to be writers. In my experience many PhD candidates are required to write in turgid and stilted prose b/c it sounds more professional.
- ryantgtg 3y agoNot PhD, but the masters program I did (urban planning) had a very strong focus on writing. I’m thankful for that, because it turns out I primarily write and edit all day. And it keeps me in business because I work with engineers and architects whose focus at school was, understandably, not writing, and I prove my worth by editing their work.
- waiseristy 3y agoLemme modify the writers words for you to more accurately describe the phenomena : “I suspect it’s easier to teach a good waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a good waiter.” Being excellent at balancing a stressful, fast paced, work environment applies to many jobs. But being excellent at being an “intellectual” whatever the hell that even means (writers? Programmers?), does not really apply to very many jobs.
- B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago> schools have failed to teach PhDs to be good writers I suspect you cannot teach that. I mean, you can whip the cur into following basic rules and avoiding egregious mistakes, but you cannot teach taste.
- ungamedplayer 3y agoI imagine that many people have taste that appeals to some people. The problem is that many teachers mark down any taste that doesn't appeal to them, effectively ensuring that writers choose only the blandest safest optiona when writing.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- devjab 3y agoCould you be taking the word "writer" to mean something different than the author? In the context of the article what I got from that line was that it would be easier to teach a waiter to be a food critic/journalist than to teach a food critic/journalist to be a waiter, more than it meant "writer" in the broader sense. I sort of agree with that interpretation. I'm not good with names, but the only names that I can tell you off the top of my head when it comes to food "writers" are: Nikolaj Kirk and Anthony Bourdain and they are both chefs.
- Ekaros 3y agoI think we should also ask what sort of writers do schools train PhDs and students to be? The writing for thesis or scientific articles is different from most other writing. Just as is legal writing for example. They really are not there to teach them poetry... Just to efficiently and in way that passes review to communicated inside the community.
- sangnoir 3y ago> I don't see why the randomly selected waitress should be better More than a few of them may already posses an English degree (: