When Did I Become a Writer?

It occurs to me that for the past two years I’ve written at least one post a week (not as much here, mostly over there). In the next week or two I’ll be spending most of my time writing demo scripts, white papers, various other technical documentation and a couple of speeches. I’m pretty sure if I counted it all up I’d have written way more English than I have Java or any other programming language. That’s not even counting email, which I’ve been writing tons more of.

What bothers me is that I’ve never been particularly good at English. My hand writing is illegible (thank goodness everything I write is typed), my spelling is pretty poor (thank goodness for spell checkers) and I wouldn’t know a grammatical rule if it came up and kick me in the backside (grammar checker plugin is currently in prototype). In theory, all that practice should make me a much better writer but frankly I don’t really see it. Going back to some very old posts, my writing style is still very similar, I still use far too many brackets (my footnotes plugin seems to have broken), and I ramble a lot.

Perhaps the key lesson is that practice by itself will get you nowhere. You also need feedback and most importantly, dedication to improvement. I don’t think I want to improve my writing often enough, and I definitely don’t get enough feedback about what’s good and bad about by writing. The only plus side is that I do tend to focus a lot more on my professional writing so that quality tends to be better.