Computer programming gets great press. Because software engineering is a prosperous, growing field—and because, even beyond the tech industry, everything will soon be run on code—young people have long been counseled on the advantages of learning how to program. I’m one of the guilty parties here. In Slate and other venues, I’ve lectured youngsters to get cracking on coding. “You don’t need to know how a computer works in order to use it—but if you learn how computers work, you may avoid one day working for them,” I argued last year.
I still believe that. And yet, when I visit software companies, I often notice that the most successful employees aren’t necessarily the best coders. Instead, leaders in the software business are usually pretty good coders who also happen to be fantastic communicators—they’ve got good ideas about software, but their real talent is the ability to get those ideas across to the rest of the organization.
And how, in a large software company, do top coders convey their ideas? The same way people communicate at small, spread-out software start-ups—or, for that matter, in economic endeavors far beyond tech, including medicine, finance, academia, and a million office jobs: They write.
Over the last two decades, as the Internet has edged out the phone as the world’s leading business communications platform, writing has surpassed talking as the most important skill in the modern workplace. Whatever you do in the new economy, wherever you go, you’re going to be called upon to write. And the better you write—the more succinctly and confidently you wield language on the page—the more you’ll stand out. If you want to succeed, then, write. Learn to write, and practice every single day.
It’s not only that writing helps you become a leader in organizations whose culture is defined primarily by interactions over email and instant message. Writing also gets your foot in the door: In the past, a young person just entering an industry would have had to schmooze to get to the top. Now you can start a terrific industry blog and, using social networks like this one, you can market your posts to leaders in your field. That is, you could do that—if only you knew how to write well.
But it’s not just marketing. The real advantage to writing is the way it forces you to clarify your ideas. Even if you work in an organization where few people communicate by text, writing your thoughts down helps you spot flaws in your thinking, or find solutions to problems that you can’t seem to crack. Have you spotted an inefficiency in a workflow that you’re trying to point out to your boss? Are you struggling to figure out how to please a customer? Do you have to decide between two hazardous career paths?
Write it all down! If you’re trying to convince your boss or a customer to make a tough decision, write down your best argument for each of them. If you’re deciding between two options, write down a pitch for each potential path. Even if you never end up showing these pieces off to anyone else, the act of writing down your thoughts will help you understand what’s important—and what’s not—as you figure out what to do next.
Here’s another way to say all this: Writing is really just a formalized way of thinking. Writing turns all those ideas that are flitting about your brain into a coherent picture of the world. That’s why you can’t ignore writing; in the modern economy, how well you write will often be taken as a proxy for how well you think. So if you want people to think that you know how to think, just sit down and write.
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