HN 写作课

工程师们二十年里聊过的写作。

工程师、作家、编辑和创业者在 Hacker News 上聊了二十年“怎么写”:怎么写得清楚、怎么讲好一个故事、技术文档怎么写、小说和出版是怎么回事。这里把其中关于写作与讲故事的帖子挑出来,配上中文导读、可以直接用的写作要点和评论翻译。

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    1. 01

      从全量里捞

      读取 Hacker News 自 2006 年以来的全部帖子,用关键词先捞出 40 分以上、可能和写作有关的约 1.1 万篇。

    2. 02

      只留真正讲写作的

      由 AI 逐条判断是否和写作、讲故事、文风、出版有实质关系,剔除“写代码”“编辑器”这类字面撞车,并分进十个类别。

    3. 03

      提炼可用的要点

      为值得读的帖子写中文导读,提炼 2-4 条可以直接用到自己写作里的要点,并精选翻译 HN 高赞评论。内容由 AI 生成,可能有误。

    出版与作家生涯2019nytimes.com

    为美国大学生代写论文在海外已成暴利生意

    Writing papers for American college students has become lucrative overseas

    阅读原文 HN 讨论
    107HN 得分
    117条评论
    4条写作要点

    导读

    这篇《纽约时报》报道讲的是美国大学生雇人代写论文的产业链——海外写手靠这个赚得盆满钵满。评论区把话题引向更深的地方:当成绩变成唯一目标、当作业跟学生真实生活无关时,写作就退化成可以外包的任务。值得写作者一读,因为它从反面说明了:读者是谁、为什么写,决定了文字是真是假。

    关键词 代写论文写作动机学术写作评分制度

    可以直接用的写作要点

    1. 01

      布置或接受一个写作任务前,先问“这篇东西给谁看、解决什么问题”;脱离真实读者的作业,最后只会写出空话或被人代写。

    2. 02

      把评分当成写作的目标,就会催生应试式的套路文章:挑最可预测的题目、背最标准的结构。想要写得有生命力,得给自己换一个真实的目标。

    3. 03

      让学生或自己写能真正发表出去的东西(媒体、公开演讲、真实项目),写作动机和质量会立刻不一样。

    4. 04

      “写完了”和“为自己写的”是两回事:代写盛行提醒我们,写作的价值在于思考过程本身,丢掉过程就只剩一个交付物。

    HN 评论精选

    分数权重越高,学生越倾向钻空子和外包作业,而不是真正学习。

    读商科时,大四有一半同学都盯着同样的投行和咨询岗位,而这些雇主极度看重成绩。除非你有非常亮眼的实习经历,否则 GPA 基本决定成败。可大家也知道,在那种公司做初级工作和在学校学的东西差得很远,并不需要真的把课程吃透。但为了拿到 offer,还是得有漂亮的分数——于是形成了应试和“钻系统空子”的文化:挑最简单、最好预测的课来刷分,死记硬背应付考试而不是真正吸收内容(因为很多教授的考卷相当标准化)。学生一旦走投无路,就找人代写论文、代做作业,甚至用假证件雇人代考。而我读工程时几乎看不到这种文化,因为工程类工作对成绩没有这么严苛的要求。

    TrackerFF查看英文原文

    When I studied business in college, I'd say that half of my senior year class were gunning for the same banking and consulting gigs. In either case, it was known and understood that those types of employers were obsessed with your grades. Unless you happened to have the most amazing and prestigious internship / experience, your GPA would make or break your chances at such firms. At the same time, we knew from internships at those types of firms that what you do / work on VS what you do at a school, varies a lot. Most knew that you didn't really need to have a 4.0 understanding of your topics to do the jr. work at an investment bank. But you still need stellar grades to land those jobs! This, in turn, lead to a culture of test-taking and "gaming the system" rather than learning. Students would take the "easiest" and most predictable classes to maximize their grades, and would religiously study for exams rather than fully soak up the course material (because as it happens, a lot of professors liked to keep their exams fairly standardized and similar). And, of course, if students were desperate, they'd get other people to do their school work. Writing essays, doing homework, even hiring people to do their exams, with fake ID, etc. When I studied Engineering, however, I didn't see much of this culture. The Engineering jobs didn't have the same stringent requirements for jobs - well, not most at least. So those are my observations. The more importance you put on grades, the more cheating and focused studying seems to appear. edit: Also, when a college degree stops being a certification/vetting of knowledge, work ethics, and persistence, and rather becomes a mere formality to for work, people will start treating it differently. I've heard classmates say things like "It's no big deal if you don't know x and y, you'll learn it through work anyway", which seems like a bad sign to me.

    代写与作弊由来已久,且远比人们以为的普遍。

    我有一位家人上世纪八十年代就是靠替别人写论文读完书的,所以这不是什么新现象。我曾做过编程辅导和咨询:辅导每小时 50 美元,咨询每小时 100 美元。大概一半找我辅导的学生开口就让我替他们写程序,我报出咨询价想劝退他们,结果大多数人眼皮都不眨一下。作弊比人们想象的普遍得多。

    lettergram查看英文原文

    One of my family members paid their way through school writing papers for others... in the 80s. I don’t think this is a new thing. I used to do consulting / tutoring for programming. Tutoring was $50 per hour, consulting was $100 per hour. Probably 50% of the students I tutored asked me to write programs for them. I’d tell them my consulting rate, in an attempt to persuade them against this path and most wouldn’t bat an eye. Cheating is way more common than people think.

    作业与真实生活脱节,就别怪学生用敷衍甚至外包的方式完成;真实项目才有真实写作。

    我朋友从零创办了一所以探究式、项目式学习为核心的高中,去参观之后,我不再愿意用脱离日常生活的方式教书。从系统的角度看,你很难不去追问那些大学和教授:你们布置的作业跟学生的生活毫无关系,他们自然也会用毫无关系的方式去完成。我自己除了在学校里,从来没写过分析性论文,所以我不再布置这类作文,而是选择跟学生生活相关的项目。也许正因如此,学生的作业被《华盛顿邮报》《华尔街日报》《福布斯》《Inc.》报道,还让他们走上了 TEDx 和哈佛的讲台,进入了 Y Combinator,拿到扎克伯格和埃里克·施密特的投资。

    spodek查看英文原文

    Visiting a high school my friend founded to be inquiry-driven project-based learning from the ground up moved me away from teaching in ways divorced from regular life. From a systemic approach, it's hard not to look at the universities and professors creating the system that this article describes: assign homework irrelevant to their lives and they'll find irrelevant ways to do it. Since I've never written an analytical essay outside of school, I avoid assigning them in favor of projects connected to students' lives. Maybe that's why my students' homework assignments get them covered in the Washington Post, WSJ, Forbes, Inc, and lead to them speaking in TEDx and Harvard, and in Y Combinator, funded by Zuckerberg and Eric Schmidt.

    作弊并非主流,大多数学生仍在认真做自己的功课。

    这里很多人都在讲不认真的、混日子的、作弊的同学,把它描绘成常态。这些事确实存在,但绝非普遍,以我的经验也不是主流。我因为拿全额奖学金去了一所中游公立大学,本以为自己很聪明、在哪个房间都是最聪明的——这种错觉大概持续了一个月(可见我当时多年轻多糊涂)。然后我发现身边的人都至少和我一样聪明,很多人更聪明、更用功(而我并不懒)、更有求知欲。我被打击了,也因此变得更好。后来我在高等教育技术领域工作,接触过很多学生,感受也一样。确实有愤世嫉俗的刷分者,更糟的是花钱买作业的人,但很大一部分学生不是这样。你大概只是不知道,因为他们不会到处炫耀自己怎么挑了最好说话的教授、怎么混到 A、怎么抄袭没被抓——他们只是在老老实实做功课。

    ineedasername查看英文原文

    Many people here are writing about classmates that didn't care, coasted, cheated, etc., painting a picture of that as the norm. I'm sure that goes on, but it's by no means universal, or even (in my experience) dominant. I went to a middle of the road public university because I got a full scholarship. I thought I was smart, the smartest in any room-- for about a month. (It says how young & dense I was that it took so long) Then I realized I was surrounded by people who were at least as smart, plenty of them smarter, harder working (and I wasn't lazy) and intellectually curious. I was humbled (and better for it). I have also worked in higher ed technology and in contact with many students as a result, and my experience with them was the same. So absolutely there are cynical grade chasers, and worse those that pay their way to do it. But a very large portion are not. You probably just don't know it because they aren't loudly bragging about how they got the easiest professor, coasted to an A, plagiarizes a paper without getting caught, etc. They're just doing the work.

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