I don’t think its a revelation to anyone in a knowledge work field that conveying complicated ideas to other people is hard. Sadly we can’t just upload an idea to someone else’s brain (yet) so the only tool we have is language, whether that be written, spoken or in our body language. Thankfully at my last job I had great, interesting and engaging coworkers so luckily I was frequently able to have good (in-person) conversations about a broad range of topics which kept that skill fresh. Similarly online I have a good variety of friends to instant message and keep up with that craft (including the freshest emoji to convey your point).
Comparatively for longer-form writing the vast majority I have written since finishing university has been for work and in the forms of:
I think these forms of writing are spoken in a particular ‘voice’: their purpose is utilitarian and you are encouraged to fit the conventions of the existing literature at that specific company. I’d like to break out of that mold a bit and exercise the skill by writing casually on other subjects.
Improving these skills has obvious implications professionally, but I think its also important personally: we’ve all experienced the frustration of trying to explain something and not being able to get your idea through. Even just writing this blog post has not been smooth, I have juggled around sentences and revised the structure a number of times with the goal of improving clarity. I hope that by writing more regularly I can improve my writing like I have seen my handwriting improve from my postcrossing adventures.
For now I don’t really care if anyone reads these, I am treating it as more of a diary of what I have been thinking about and what I have been up to over time. There is no tracking on this site so I can’t even tell if people are reading it anyway.
Post image was generated using DALL-E 3 through Bing Image Creator. Generated at 2024-01-06T12:37:47Z using the prompt “a nerdy ginger man in a dark room typing a blog post into a computer at night. watercolor. NO BEARD.”. I tried many prompts like “shaved, clean shaven, beardless” to remove the beard but most of those only made the beards even stronger. The AI gods have spoken and now I must grow one. The generated image originally had a white boarder so I changed it to black in paint.net which stripped the content credentials so you just have to trust me about its origin. I’ll fix that for future posts if I keep using Bing Image Creator.