Leslie Lamport says you should learn to write well, because people will judge you by your writing, but more importantly it is the key to thinking well. The better you write the better you think the better you write.
But there's something Leslie didn't say, he talked about why to write well, but he didn't say how to write well except that writing well comes with practice, which isn't horrible advice. (The clip is only two minutes long, so cut the guy some slack!)
To write well you must read well.
Moreover, reading, thinking, writing, thinking, reading is the virtuous spiral of learning. Reading gives you ideas to think and write about. Thinking generates new ideas and integrates them with what you already know. Writing tests and refines those ideas. Each iteration you are just a little better, a little smarter for the effort.
I want to read and write more...a lot more. I've been learning to improve my reading and writing habits.
Reading
People read more and more every day. People read Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. People read mommy blogs. People read emails and texts. But this is not a balanced diet. Much of what we read today is short-form, polemic, snark. It is banal. There can be a place for that, but when fed only junk food your mind will get soft and flabby. Your mind needs to get to the gym.When I say I need to "read more," what I mean is I need to "read more long-form...mostly books." I'm also thinking mostly of non-fiction. Yes, you can acquire information through YouTube and podcasts, but that will bias you toward recent ideas and a select group of "content creators" with specialized skills and tools. You can't easily skim a YouTube video. YouTube and podcasts are no substitute for books.
Through a book you can learn from people who have been dead for 1,000 years. You can learn from kings as easily as from ordinary people who had only pen and paper. You expose yourself to possibilities outside your sphere of experience. There's a wealth of knowledge available in books, and they aren't all digitized.
While you are learning something else happens, reading (whether fiction or non-fiction) improves your language skills like spelling, vocabulary, and grammar. You can absorb different writing styles from poets, novelists, journalists, mathematicians. From this soup of styles your own writing voice will emerge.
These benefits will only come to you if you read well.
Read with pen in hand.
Research indicates that by engaging with your books you will retain more information longer. Read with pen in hand. Some use their pen for marginalia, but a more effective use will be to write the things you learn on a separate piece of paper in your own words.To do this you need to summarize the most salient ideas. As you read periodically pause and quiz yourself. What is the author saying? How does this relate to other things you know? This will help you internalize the information as a connected graph of knowledge in your mind. The more connections an idea has the more meaning you impart to it, and the more "handles" you have to grab it and pull it out.
Both for summarizing in my own words and for connecting ideas I sometimes wait until the next day to summarize my reading, without referring back to it. This allows my mind to organize, connect, and highlight the ideas that are important to me. Sometimes I may even re-read something few times over the course of a couple of days to let my mind extract more. (Perhaps only for books that are fertile ground for interesting ideas.)
But after you decide what is important, write it down. You will make best use of the ideas if you keep some notebooks or use a note-taking app. Even if you just throw the notes away you will help your mind retain and comprehend ideas by using your own hand to write the ideas in your own words. You can do this by reading with pen in hand.
Read widely.
The more you connect an idea to other ideas the more valuable it becomes. The more you connect an idea to other ideas the more meaning it receives and the more meaning it gives. Reading widely is a great way to fill your mind with a diversity of ideas.A recommendation system doesn't help you seek out new ideas. You have to do it. One way to do this is to go to the library, walk up and down the isles, and flip through any book that catches your eye. You may pick up only one idea. That's great! (I'll talk more about how to read ruthlessly later.) Browsing is a fine way to break out of your interests.
Sometimes you can get good recommendations from friends, family, acquaintances. Their interests may be similar to yours, but chances are they are not exactly the same. Ask: "what is the most interesting book you have read recently?" You can try asking this of people you know have very different interests from you. Perhaps even start a monthly email thread with the topic "what have you read recently?" If your friends, family, acquaintances have a hard time answering the question, maybe they'll be encouraged to read more. :)
Reading widely can take a certain amount of humility, especially when you read about ideas that directly oppose your cherished beliefs. You don't have to change your mind, but try to empathize with the people behind the ideas, their struggles, and their experiences that lead them to believe this thing. Think about the light each idea sheds on all the other things you know, and the value you will get by adding to the richness and subtlety of your knowledge web.
A rich web of knowledge will help you find creative solutions to the problems you face. I believe the most revolutionary ideas are born from the unexpected combination of seemingly unrelated ideas. Read widely to fill out that knowledge web.
Read deeply.
Breadth of exposure is helpful for your mind to draw connections between ideas, but so is depth. Your mind is a pattern matching machine. If you give it two ideas it will quickly suss out the similarities and differences.So if you want to understand the fine distinctions in a subject, read topically. For example, if you want to study the Bible, don't look for the "best" translation, get them all. If you compare passages among translations you'll quickly get to the root of translation disagreements, and all without learning a lick of Greek or Hebrew!
When you read a book on a subject, use it as a starting point. Look through its bibliography and sources cited, and go read them. Use the recommendation system at Amazon to find related books. Go to the library shelves that contain a book and check out those near to it. Ask people for recommendations of books similar to ones you've read.
As you load your mind with information, it will go to work. It performs magic while you sleep, or while you daydream. Let yourself get bored. Let your mind wander. You'll think about ideas, how they are the same, and how they are different. Then write it all down. Reading deeply will give your mind plenty of fodder.
Read ruthlessly
If you feel your reading list getting much, much longer, then I have good news: you don't have to read every word. You don't even have to finish a book. An author has put a lot of work into a book, and you should accept that gift graciously, but the author has no right to demand your time. Unfortunately "speed reading" doesn't help here. You should learn to skim, and be OK with not extracting every idea from a book.When reading broadly, the point is to find new ideas. If there's a book that looks interesting pick it up. Read the summary. Look through the table of contents. But if the summary and the table of contents don't induce you to read more, then put it back. If you get half way through the book and lose interest, put it back. Take one idea, and put it back. If that idea tickles your fancy, then make it a subject for a deep read.
Ironically, reading deeply also does not require reading every word of every book. As you read topically you'll realize that there's overlapping content. Your first book on a subject may require special attention, but after that you can bound through a book in search of its unique angle.
You alone will have to make an accounting for how you spend your time, and you only have so much of it. Define your reading program based on your own goals and interests, then: Drop. Books. Ruthlessly. Even if it is one that you originally thought would be valuable.
By being ruthless, you will focus on the most potent ideas and build generous knowledge web. No one else will have your unique combination of ideas. Now you must write about them.
Writing
Software engineers undervalue writing. Probably this is so in any career. If you write well (emails, chats, texts, pull requests, documentation, ...), you will distinguish yourself. In addition to distinguishing yourself at work, in this internet age you can improve your chances of being discovered. You can write a niche blog and find an audience. You may not find thousands of readers, but you only need one reader to change your life with a job, a speaking engagement, an opportunity.I could say a lot of things about writing well, but as I've read about it I've seen four themes: economy, action, warmth, reading.
Economy
Writers advise to avoid adverbs and adjectives, to remove qualifiers ("I think," "some," "many," "possibly"), to avoid cliches, to avoid fluff. Most of this advice reduces to using words economically. Say what you want to say briefly and clearly.If some slip through, that's OK, because the editing process is 110% about removing words. Pascal famously said "I wish I could have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time," because concision is hard. You will re-write, re-write, then re-write some more, and it should get shorter each time.
Action
I find this one really tough. As an engineer I usually describe machines and processes. I find it easy to write in a passive voice. (The last sentence was "It is easy for me to write in a passive voice.") When you write passively, you see state of being verbs. You end up with a pronoun as a subject, and the true subject later in the sentence. It's all a bit twisty for people to decode. You may find value in tools like writegood-mode for Emacs.Warmth
William Zinsser's book On Writing Well is a worthwhile read. In it he advises writing with warmth, which for him is writing about the human element. He reminds me of the great preacher Charles Spurgeon who no matter the passage, Old Testament or New, he would find his way to Jesus. No matter the subject, William will always find his way to a story about people.Writing about people is one way to achieve warmth. Another way is to write honestly with your own voice. Some people adopt an artificial voice when they write. Perhaps they sound too formal. Find your own voice and be true to it.
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