We’re talking right now about the number one most critical skill that can drive your career success and impact: writing. The last thing we talked about was that if you are going to write effectively you’ve got to know why you are writing, and we identified 3 modes of written technical communication. Let’s talk about […]

Much of the writing you’ll do in your technical career will be for one of three purposes: dissemination, persuasion, and information.
There are other areas, such as writing to express personal opinions, but these don’t show up often in the course of your professional writing. There is some overlap between dissemination, persuasion, and information (and […]

So you’re writing to communicate, executing well, and being sure that what you are saying is accurate and sensible. But how do you get people to actually want to read what you write?
Tell a story
When possible—and it usually is—tell a story.
Another way to say this is “know what you are saying, to whom, and why,” […]

Writing is communication that lasts. Apart from writing well (i.e., your thoughts are organized and presented with proper sentence structure), make sure that what you say is accurate and sensible.
This is obviously true for the documents we think of as “permanent” and we are used to taking care with papers, manuals, and reports.
The real […]

Ok, so the reports and documents I write in Word and submit to my management are forever, but not email. That’s different…right?
Nope, that too, and this does mean you.
Casual email habits start early
Many of us spend a lot of time writing and reading e-mail, and most of us have our first experiences in e-mail communicating […]

Writing is communication that lasts.
If you don’t believe me, Google for the phrase “antiquarian books” or “rare manuscripts.” You’ll see books, codices, manuscripts, scrolls, and tablets going back millennia.
Technical documents hang around forever
In the modern technical workplace, white papers are stored for future reference. Progress reports are passed up the chain and stored […]

The act of writing is fundamentally the act of communicating information to someone else. This sounds simple enough, right?
A quick exercise
Pick up a technical article in your field. Or, even better, pick up one in a technical field you don’t know much about. What do you see?
Does the author organize his material in an […]

It is nearly impossible to overstate the benefits of being able to write well.
In my experience it is more important to be able to write well than to speak well, at least until you reach very senior levels of your organization or are interacting regularly with the public directly as a representative of your company. […]

Between 75 and 100 emails get through my various filters at work and home every day. This isn’t a huge e-mail load, but still represents a problem. If every email consumes only two minutes of my time (read, trash or respond, and file) I’ve burned between 2 and 3.5 hours each and every day doing […]

We were just talking about doing a good job with your written products, because they are going to be around for a long time:
But the first time something goes out of your immediate group, or up the chain in your organization, spend the effort to make it as clean, tight, and clear as possible. Get […]