I think oral and written communication is probably the most overlooked skill for engineers. Write. It gets easier with practice. As you get better at it, it will come more naturally and you will be more confident. Quality, fluency, and confidence all make people much more likely to believe what you are saying and act favorably towards your suggestions.
At a practical level, you can write your way into jobs (or investment), and if you do it right writing does not rot, so you can continue to reap benefits from things you've written long before. That lets you store time in a bottle, which has really nice implications for time-strapped entrepreneurs.
(This also implies that you'd probably be better doing public writing than writing which winds up in the email archives of BigCorp or behind a logistical and cultural wall almost nobody will pierce at your institution of higher learning.)
This is a bit tongue in cheek, but I'll argue that reading is the other half of an overlooked set of skills. I'll write up a clear problem description -- including a structured format, not just detail -- to find myself subsequently repeatedly correcting the recipient. Conversing quickly determines that they haven't actually read what I've written; sometimes they're honest about this, sometimes not so much. But it's apparent, either way.
I try to make myself briefer -- my writing condensed -- in the hope that the shortness of the message will avoid invoking avoidance based purely on the volume of content. And I try to communicate less often, collecting observations into a few well-composed summaries rather than a rapid fire flurry of messages -- particularly when I know the recipient will not be addressing the topic immediately in any event.
But then I get accused, typically by some less technical manager, of "not communicating enough".
All by way of saying, I guess, that I find skill in writing very important. But there's a certain point where the problem becomes your audience's (or, depending on mood, leave off the apostrophe s ;-).
P.S. I note now your use also of the term "oral". There, too, there is the problem of the other half. Meetings that largely reiterate previous meetings, because the attendees apparently didn't make an effort to retain the information. This... syndrome can become self-perpetuating. People come to expect that anything important will be repeated at them, potentially ad infinitum. The repetition becomes expected and depended upon, making it in turn necessary.
People sometimes wonder why I take so many notes. But a month or two later, I can tell you what happened in that meeting. And if my work depends upon that information, I've executed accordingly.
"Information is meant to be consumed. It's meant to be free. It's meant to reach as many people as humanly possible, shared, and discussed."
Let's be fair. Different information is "meant" for different things. My email password is not meant to be free. And I think if Calacanis has decided that his writing is now meant for a different level of freedom, that's his call. If others aren't jumping ship with him, they probably just have different needs/goals (and these may change). Thoughtful and open writing really does have a great power for networking/community-building, but there are trade-offs.
A good essay on the whole, I just don't think we should appeal to the moral aspirations of raw information. The current state of the internet seems to show that the world wants (often demands) free information, but we're still reeling (economically and otherwise) from this movement, and waiting to see where it ultimately will lead.
As a technologist at feel at times that web entrepreneurship is all about writing: most entrepreneurs I have met outsource coding to someone else and all they do is write: blog posts, tweets, emails to investors, answering support forum questions...
It's common to hear stories that begin with "Sergey and Larry..." but I doubt those guys spent any time blogging and tweeting about how awesome Google was going to be. Just one more reason to be more like S&G, that's all :)
Another reason to write more is that there tends to be a positive correlation between Writing More and Sucking Less [At Writing], and in the business world there's really something to be said for Sucking Less [At Writing] because regardless of how smart you are or how great your product is if you can't string together a coherent sentence on your blog you run the serious risk of making yourself and your colleagues look dumber than you all probably are (at least in the eyes of people who care about Sucking Less [At Writing]).
Almost anything paragraph size can be squeezed down to 140 characters.
While I agree with the article at large, I disagree with this. There is definitely value in writing things between 140 characters and essay-length, if only to jot down complete ideas without grooming them into a lengthy piece of essay quality.
I completely agree... I would also add that it allows you to get feedback on your ideas. I wrote about this a couple months ago: http://techneur.com/post/524363996/the-best-exercise-any-ent... I truly believe it's the best thing for a business that every entrepreneur should do.
One of the benefits in forcing yourself to write is that you must learn to structure your thoughts and communicate them effectively. This is a valuable skill in any field.
I can imagine writing skills being especially important as a business scales and more and more information is communicated in written form, both with customers and employees.
Your post is just masturbation. You don't really need to write this comment, informing us of your opinion on this topic. But you do. Because you'd like some karma, and some recognition.
Only slightly sarcastic, but not everything has be to worrying about money.
I disagree: HN discussions are discussions, not blogs. The primary motivation for posting something here is to engage in a conversation. It's a very different form of writing as compared to blogging, for example. Running a blog is like running a 2nd business (in addition to your primary startup) - i.e. you have to spend a lot of time not just writing, but getting traction, promoting it, etc. Of course that would be a distraction for S&L, since building a search engine (not getting blog traction) was their goal.
At a practical level, you can write your way into jobs (or investment), and if you do it right writing does not rot, so you can continue to reap benefits from things you've written long before. That lets you store time in a bottle, which has really nice implications for time-strapped entrepreneurs.
(This also implies that you'd probably be better doing public writing than writing which winds up in the email archives of BigCorp or behind a logistical and cultural wall almost nobody will pierce at your institution of higher learning.)