Becoming a Better Writer

Writing is an increasingly important skill for engineering leaders. Poor writing can hamper career progression, above a certain level. Tactics for more clear, more frequent and more confident writing.

Q: I’ve observed that my writing is not up to par with my peers. How can I improve my professional writing, as someone working in tech?

I get this question from many people: senior engineers who realize they need to level up their writing if they are to grow to a staff position, engineering managers who feel they are not at the same level as their peers in expressing their expertise and thoughts, and even product managers who feel they write less efficiently than they want to.

In this issue we cover:

• The importance of writing for software engineers, engineering managers, and executives.

• The process of writing well

  • Editing approaches to make your writing crisper.

  • Getting feedback on your writing.

• Improving how you write

  • Observing and copying great writing.

  • Habits to build your writing muscle.

  • Continuous learning: books, and tools to boost your writing.

The below article has recommendations for various paid products. As per my ethics policy, I have not been paid to recommend any of these, and no links are affiliate ones.

Why is writing important?

With remote work and distributed teams becoming more common, strong writing skills are a baseline for most engineering leadership positions. In fact, writing is becoming so important that companies like Amazon start their engineering manager screening process with a writing exercise, as I covered in the issue Hiring Engineering Managers. Other companies that have writing exercises during the interview process include Stripe – for Staff+ engineers – and TrueLayer, for principal engineers.

If you are a software engineer at a high-growth startup or Big Tech, the chances are you write more words per day than you write code. Everyday writing includes:

• Commit summaries.

• Code review comments.

• Chat messages.

• Emails.

• Engineering planning documents.

• Comments on proposals, Project Requirement Documents (PRDs) or engineering planning documents.

• Postmortems.

• Performance reviews: peer reviews, self reviews and promotion documents.

If you’re an engineering manager, a tech lead or a staff engineer, then you’ll likely be writing even more of these:

• Emails and chat messages.

• Meeting agendas and meeting summaries.

• Proposals for projects, headcounts.

• Status update emails and documents for projects.

• Presentations.

Crisp writing can help accelerate your professional career. As I wrote in the article Undervalued software engineering skills: writing well:

“It is at a larger organisation that writing becomes critical because messages reach a bigger audience. For software engineers, writing becomes the tool to reach, converse with and influence engineers and teams outside their immediate peer group.

Writing becomes essential to make thoughts, tradeoffs and decisions durable. Writing things down makes these thoughts available for a wide range of people to read. Things that should be made durable can include proposals and decisions, coding guidelines, best practices, learnings, runbooks, debugging guides, postmortems. Even code reviews.

For people to read what you write, it needs to be written well. If you grab people's attention early on, they will keep reading and receive the message you intend to get across. More of them will respond to it and do so with fewer misunderstandings of what you meant.

By writing well, you can scale your ability to communicate efficiently to multiple teams, to an organisation or across the whole company. And the ability to communicate and influence beyond your immediate team is the essential skill for engineers growing in seniority; from senior engineer to what organizations might call lead, principle, staff or distinguished engineer.”

The greater the influence of your position, the more people your writing will reach. In senior leadership positions, writing skills are yet more important. Engineering leaders who are also prolific writers include Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth the future CTO of Meta, Michael Lopp, formerly VP of Engineering at Slack, Will Larson, CTO of Calm and Steven Sinofsky, former head of Microsoft’s Windows division. As Steven Sinofsky writes in the article Writing is Thinking:

“Writing (and reading) really helps people if they are remote, if there is not a shared native language, or both. Writing can be difficult for some, for sure. That is why it is important to focus on the function, not the form. Don’t be afraid to help people (especially as a manager) through the process of the “basics” of writing.”

The Process of Writing Well

When you read a piece of well-written content, know that several steps happened behind the scenes: