In this post, I share 8 principles I believe in:
- Less is more
- Start with the solution or the ask
- Show the facts, with examples
- Always quantify
- Include links and references
- Explain why it matters
- Ask feedback from one person
- Sleep on it
As engineers and developers, we often focus heavily on technical skills while neglecting the importance of clear, compelling writing. But the reality is, our ability to communicate effectively can have a major impact on our careers.
- No AI art.
Good tips, but how does one practice them? Often times I see advice along the same lines but no offers on how to improve these skills.
Write to non technical humans and ask them for feedback, and if it is clear what’s goong on even if they dont understand some stuff.
Then do the same with various levels of technical people and different walks of life.
I would suggest writing blog posts about topics that you’re familiar with. Make sure you write the posts such that also people not too familiar with the material can follow it. Share your posts, and ask for questions and feedback.
I have been thinking about starting a blog.
Any recommendations for self-hosted blogging? The setup itself might be worthy of a post :)
I use Astro, because it allows me to write posts in Markdown and publish as a static website, though there are certainly other solutions that allow you to achieve the same thing. I just bundle it up in an Nginx Docker image and host it on Fly.io. If you want you can look at my setup here, though beware it isn’t documented (even the README is already out of date): https://github.com/arendjr/phebe
The last two points, “Ask feedback from one person”, and “Sleep on it” I think are great. Ironically the article ignores the rest of its own tips.
- Less is more
Circular logic. Q: “how do I write more efficiently?” A: “with less words” This “tip” could be omitted entirely.
- Start with the solution or the ask. […] In ideal cases, the main message you want to convey is already in the title.
Better title: “8 Writing Efficiency Tips for Software Professionals”, or maybe “8 Tips for Software Professionals to Communicate More Efficiently”?
- Show the facts, with examples
No text extracts provided in the article. For example a rewritten paragraph, or comparison of some summaries.
- Always quantify
Always! Except for this article which does not suggest a way to measure the efficiency of text e.g. number of words to convey the same message.
- Include links and references
None provided.
- Explain why it matters
Why would I want to write more efficiently? What real-world problems does efficient writing solve? Maybe I’m a software engineer new to the field and I don’t know how pressed for time some managers are, or how people are drowning in verbose corporate junk words?
Maybe this article was LLM generated, like the cover graphic :(
I don’t think I want to use that laptop.
Must be one of those new Microsoft AI laptops.
the ask
This is where the English stopped, so I knew to stop reading.
Please leave the sales-chad jargon to the car lot, if you could.
I’m pretty sure this is precisely the kind of thinking OP is trying to break you out of. If you make it far enough in your career, dealing with people who talk like that will become part of your job. We’d all like to just spend our time coding, but you can’t just ignore the people who write your paycheck.
