Career advice: Learn how to write

Even in the times of generative AI it will prove to be a useful skill

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Ever since college I have been a prolific writer and, if I may say so, a pretty decent one.

If that all sounds a tad arrogant I would like to quote my dear old mother, who used to say: “False modesty is worse than vanity.”

Being able to convey my point in words has always been very useful to me because almost everything I do requires the ability to capture thoughts, ideas, and plans into a consistent and coherent piece of text. That is even true for writing software because, much like human languages, programming languages require you to represent a larger train of thought into a document that is made up of smaller meaning-bearing elements that have to make sense when read in conjunction.

Leaving programming languages aside for a moment, working in tech means working in teams, working in teams means communication, and a lot of that communication is in written form. As a profession we write an awful lot, on Slack, in email, in tickets, on Wiki pages, and of course in “regular” documents. Written text is how we convey what we know, what we need to know, what we’ve learnt, and what we are proposing to do. Obviously, the better you are at that, the more effective you will be at your job.

Apart from conveying information, written text often also serves as argumentation. Half of the words I write seek to convince someone that my plan, design, or proposal is the right one. To do that, I need to carefully structure my text so that the reader will come to share my point of view. And even if they won’t, a well crafted written argumentation will make the ensuing discussion more productive.

Unfortunately, a lot of the documents I read are terrible.

Here is an example from my other field of expertise (law): Last week, the Dutch undersecretary for long-term and social care (Vicky Maeijer) made the news because she apparently committed the academic sin of plagiarism in her 2009 law school master thesis. Apart from the obvious problems with that in an academic setting, it is an objectively terrible piece of text, full of spelling mistakes, weird grammatical constructions, bad sentences, and obvious “Dutchisms” (meaning: Words or sentence structures directly and incorrectly translated from Dutch into English). Inexplicably, she still got a passing grade for this piece of crap and now she is a government minister, which just goes to show that some people cannot help but fail upwards.

That said, the university launched an investigation and she might lose her academic title. I will admit to some amount of glee about this because it is yet another example of the many unmitigated morons that the right wing “Party for Freedom” seems to harbor in copious amounts.

A lot of technical documents I read suffer from the same problems as Vicky’s thesis and that makes them hard to read. A good document requires one pass of reading and at the end you cannot help but completely agree with whatever point the author was making. Well-written documents are not only persuasive, they also save time for the reader. If you have to go back and read a document twice or thrice to understand what is going on, that is a waste of time that accumulates over the entire audience. If the document is so chaotic that even after two passes you don’t understand what is going on, it is a gigantic waste of everyone’s time.

At this point you might think: “Well, that is easy for you to say; you clearly got a talent for writing.”

My answer to this is the following story which involves my piano teacher Don Hemwall. Don regularly drives up to Maine and halfway up the I95 north of Boston there is a gas station with a little shopping and restaurant complex. The hall of that complex contains a piano and Don often sits down and plays for a while. Whenever he does that, people walk up to him and tell him how wonderful it must be to have such a God given talent. “Nope”, Don answers, “it’s just practice.” “But surely”, people typically respond, “you must have an amazing talent for music.” “Not really”, Don replies, “it’s really all practice. If I don’t practice for a day, I notice. If I don’t practice for two days, my wife notices. If I don’t practice for three days, the audience notices.”

Writing is the same, it’s all practice. I have been writing for decades and it’s true what they say: Practice makes perfect. On top of the practice I read books on writing, I read books on writing style, and when I read a particularly well-written text, I analyze what makes it so convincing and easy to digest. I write, and rewrite, and from time to time read my own writing to see if it needs editing and to find places where I could have done a better job. Truly, if I spent as much time practicing the piano as I do writing, I might have been a rockstar by now.

I praise myself lucky that I attended a college that spent a lot of time on writing. I attended the computer science program of a technical college in The Hague, but on top of all the math and computer science topics, Dutch was a compulsory part of the program all the way until the final year. To the surprise of many, the first year required us all to take a spelling test that consisted of a hundred questions with edge cases of the Dutch language. If you made more than two mistakes, you had to retake the test. As an incentive, it had been decreed that if you still hadn’t passed the spelling test by the end of the first year, you failed the entire year.

Throughout my time in college, Dutch remained a mainstay of the academic program. On top of spelling correctly, they also taught us how to write persuasively, how to structure a report, and how to analyze and summarize a piece of text. To top it off, the Dutch teachers reviewed your final thesis and you got a separate grade for your correct use of Dutch.

The reason for all of this Dutch language training was made clear to us at the outset. “Once you join the workforce”, they explained, “you will write a lot of documents and if you don’t know how to do that you are not effective and if you make spelling mistakes that looks just plain dumb.” They were right on both accounts.

One of the biggest advantages of writing lies in the fact that writing well requires thinking clearly. Because of this, writing is a vehicle to organize your mind.

I typically find that when I am unable to hack out a well written document that means that I haven’t thought through the entire problem yet or that I don’t have the structure of the core argument clearly in my head. For me, writing serves as an assistive device for thinking through all aspects of the problem and figuring out the most persuasive arguments for my solution. I write and edit, write some more, then edit some more, until such time as I have a document that I am happy with. The writing serves as a tool to force me to do the thinking. This works so well that when I am designing something, I often start writing, because the process of writing down the things that I know helps me to solidify these thoughts and get them out of my head, so that I can continue thinking about the rest of the problem.

You might think that in an era with generative AI, writing skills are less important. Students clearly tend to think that this is true, given the amount of AI-generated text that shows up in school assignments. I would be among the last person to say that LLMs cannot be extremely helpful in getting some text together, but there are limits to what it can do. Sure, if you need to produce a piece of text on a question that has been answered thousands of times already, the AI generated results are excellent. It is also brilliant in combining information that is already out there into a clear explanation. But, the more novel the thing you need to write about is, the more you need to mix the AI’s words with your own in order to make a document that is fit for purpose. So for the foreseeable future I think it makes sense to be good at writing. And even if you make liberal use of generative AI, you need to be a good writer to validate that whatever the model generated makes sense for your audience or needs some massaging to be effective.

Like learning how to play the piano, there are no shortcuts in learning how to write. It really is all practice. So you better start yesterday!