Why Write?
I like to write, but I find that many engineers think writing is tedious or even a waste of time. So I thought I’d ask myself: why should anyone write?
To Clarify Your Own Thoughts
The first major benefit I find in writing is that it allows me to focus my own thinking. On any given day, I have a broad range of internal dialog on varied topics: software engineering, US politics, how business organizations function, music, design, and human geography — much of what I think about isn’t particularly structured or useful.
Much in the way that meditation allows you to become an observer of your own thoughts, so too can writing. My mind can be a turbulent river of interrupting ideas, but writing allows me to highlight interesting ones, eliminate unrelated thoughts, and organize what’s left into a coherent arc.
To Bring Your Ideas To Life
Until you communicate them, your ideas aren’t “real” to anyone but you. So, the second major reason you need to write is so that other people can access your ideas and thinking.
As you become more senior in your trade (whatever it is), you become a technical authority on what needs to be done. But how do you communicate your grand plan to others? And by the way — those in your audience often aren’t experts, so you need to write accessibly to those with less background on your topic.
Written communication is a “force multiplier” that allows you to scale yourself to a team, multiple teams, multiple organizations, or the industry as a whole. To bring your ideas to life, you need to understand several things: who your reader is, what they know and don’t know, how much time they’ll have to read, and how you want them to respond when they do.
To Get Help When You’re Stuck
If a problem is hard to the point that you can’t solve it, it’s very likely that others will also struggle with it. Yes, even your local Guru of Trade may struggle. This is particularly true when you’ve been looking at a problem for days or even weeks. In this case, you are likely the expert, but you’re missing some critical pieces of information.
But, you can dial up your odds. To increase the likelihood of finding the right information, you need to clearly state your problem, and describe all of the relevant background another person would need in order to get up to speed. This is the same core skill set you need when trying to persuade a reader towards some outcome, but your end goal is different, here. When getting help, the thesis you want to prove is “I don’t know X,” not “I believe X.”
To Create a Recorded History
Above I’ve argued primarily for writing to understand the current state of the world, or to persuade some future outcomes. However, just as useful is to create a historical record that can be referenced when looking back in time.
Much in the way that software engineers use Git to create checkpoints in a development process, individuals and organizations can use documents to do the same for human thoughts. Architectural Decision Records are one example of a structured process for doing this. As with Git, you will find that attributing a body of work is useful for later iteration and discovery.
Investment in a written record can be hard to rationalize or sell in the now; it’s a long-term investment and you’ve got other priorities. So, don’t boil the ocean. Use decision documents as a process fragment whenever making major changes. In doing so, you will get all of the other benefits of writing I’ve mentioned so far, too. And much like Pull Requests create a process checkpoint in creating a Git history, so too can your decision documents.
To Celebrate Your Wins
Much of the writing we see online is far from altruistic. Enterprising individuals write to aggrandize their professional stature or to grift a product or service towards financial gain. Content is often a commercial tool, not created under the auspices of communal advancement or individual benevolence.
That’s okay. You don’t need to be intrinsically motivated to write; you don’t even need to like doing it all that much. Many of the reasons I’ve mentioned for writing are indeed self-serving in some way. And after all, why would you participate in something that doesn’t do you any good? Like any core skill in Engineering, you can use writing as a tool when you need to advance your goals or the goals of your organization.
It’s also okay to write about your achievements, or ideally the achievements of you and those around you. (A rising tide lifts all boats.) When done well, writing to celebrate successes can be useful to build credibility. With credibility, experts will seek you out when they have interesting types of problems. Then, you get to work on more interesting and fitting problems. Only by delineating your areas of competency can others understand how best to engage you.
Closing Thoughts
Well, there are a few reasons I think writing is useful for engineers. I talked very little about how to actually write, which is something I’m still trying to figure out. 😂 Practice, I think.
