Inspired by Jason, Jake and Anil (and others) I've been thinking about writing more. As Joe Posnanski has:
Most of the books on writing I have seen don't speak to me at all. They seem to focus on tricks or rules or shortcuts. These are the very things that made me believe, throughout my childhood up through my first couple of years in college, that writing is a horrible chore that a person must endure, not unlike a weight-loss diet.
It's going to hurt. There's nothing we can do about that. But read this book, and we'll make it hurt as little as possible.
I'm obviously biased, but I don't think writing -- the REAL stuff -- hurts at all. I think it is, as Woody Allen once wrote, as much fun as you can have without laughing. I don't think I'm alone. You can tell by the proliferation of blogs on the Web that a lot of people love to write. They may not love to write briefs or reports or reviews, but give a person something her or she is passionate about, something they know a little bit about, and it's natural -- it's HUMAN -- to just start communicating about it. Writing, talking, gesturing ... it all comes from the same place.
And from a letter Jeff Atwood received about Stack Overflow:
I can think of no other medium where I can test my writing chops (by writing an answer), get immediate feedback on its quality (particularly when writing quality trumps technical correctness, such as subjective questions) and see other peoples attempts as well and how they compare with mine. Votes don’t lie and it gives me a good indicator of how well an email I might send out to future co-workers would be received or a business proposal I might write.
Over the course of the past 5 months all the answers I’ve been writing have been more and more refined in terms of the quality. If I don’t end up as the top answer I look at the answer that did and study what they did differently and where I faltered. Was I too verbose or was I too terse? Was I missing the crux of the question or did I hit it dead on?
Nota bene: this post started out as me eviscerating some horrible writing, and I decided to be positive instead.
