Why to write every day?

There are a lot of articles about maing writing every day a habit.

Engineers (a category which I broadly include myself, if only because I don’t know what other title I can choose) are not very good writers. From what I can tell there is only one way to improve this, and that is by writing. My wife started a daily(ish) writing habit and was very quickly churning out very good writing. This is not really a surprise, she’s a philosopher, and their deliverables take the form of writing. They usually don’t even have any graphs in! This is something she should be (and is) good at.

By contrast. I’m an engineer, we pretend that our outputs are something other than writing, but actually a huge amount of engineering output is writing. Most projects start with a proposal and conclude with a written report, so the act of writing is a fundamental skill in both getting, and delivering work. Tools must be (but are rarely properly) documented. Requirements must be sought, and refined. All of these things are core skill sin engineering.

But aside from those domain specific things the argument runs that writing things regularly, just for the act of writing, helps to teach you how to marshall an argument, how to arrange your thoughts and concepts into neat formations and send them out well prepared.
I think there is probably something to this. ⊕ I certainly hope there is, as anyone ho’s been near when I’ve tried to explain something will be aware, it’s often a mess of scribbles and shapes and arm waving into a whole sort of general mish mash of…. thingness. Translating between human and technical is something that engineers need to be able to do. We used to describe workflow as a V shape flowchart in technical modelling. Starting out with Client Requirement at the top left of the V, dropping down into the technical, mathsy, modelling bit at the bottom of the V and then climbing back out to a final report at the top right. The whole workflow essentially being translating from human to technical and then from technical back to human at the end.

The other thing that I’ve noticed is that it encourages me to be doing something. To have some kind of project ongoing that’s interesting enough to write about. ⊕ The down side of this is when I spend all day querying various weather data API’s and end up with nothing to show for it. I suppose I could write a post about data formats of different API’s? It’s a pretty low level of external motivation, but it’s not zero.

I was talking about this with a friend recently and they raised a very good point. Given that I don’t really intend any of this to have an audience and that I’m really not concerning myself all that much with quality, Why publish it. Why not just write. Or write and publish it when you feel you have something worth sharing. The answer is… I don’t know. But I think it does need to be available. Again for that minimal viable accountability. If it were just a file on my desktop then I think I wouldn’t get the same motivation that I do from putting up on an obscure website, even if the results are broadly the same.
The other fringe benefit is that I get practice in figuring out the infrastructure of getting a site up and running. I have an excuse to figure out how to set up the DNS servers and how to establish taxonomies of posts, or more recently how to add the appropriate meta tags for Twitter cards. ⊕ Something which I have not done on this site yet, because I haven’t shared any links to Twitter, but Lisa’s site is both better written and also better supported. I’ll probably integrate the various improvement that I’ve made to her site over here eventually.

I guess if I keep doing this we’ll eventually see if I get any better at writing. Then we’ll know if the theory works.