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   Soatok Dreamseeker (soatok@furry.engineer)'s status on Sunday, 20-Jul-2025 01:43:31 JST Soatok Dreamseeker

   The secret to getting good at writing is being very weird but also caring a lot about other people being able to understand what you're saying.

   You gotta be in touch with your own weirdness first. Then you gotta be able to make it relatable to the audience.

   This is especially true for technical writing. You need to figure out what your audience already knows or believes, and tie whatever you're explaining to that.

   So, like, you can explain Diffie-Hellman mathematics with paint-mixing and "secret colors", right? There are videos that do that. Except instead of colors, it's large numbers.

   And it's not a perfect analogy, but it's serviceable.

   The thing is, you don't get good at writing by scoring higher on some imaginery hierarchy. It isn't "who's the smartest nerd?" Winning nerd trivia isn't essential.

   You fucking need empahty.

   You have to care about the reader. Or, at the very least, about the time they're investing in your words.

   But if you say it like that, people assume you're talking about fiction.

   • ✧✦Catherine✦✧ repeated this.
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     nadja (dequbed@mastodon.chaosfield.at)'s status on Sunday, 20-Jul-2025 09:27:22 JST nadja

     in reply to

     @soatok stuff like is absolutely why I always say I only truly understand something if I can teach it because to teach it I not only have to have understood the subject but enough of the surrounding and all the bases that I can understand how a student came to a given misunderstanding and then clear up that misunderstanding. That's much more than just knowing the subject itself.