I have talked before about the importance of reading and how it was vital to my success as a programmer. The flip side of that is writing. Coding is a subset of writing, so a better writer will make a better coder. The goals of the writing may be different, but ability is similar, therefore I am always looking for ways to improve my writing skills. Anecdotally, I have always noticed the best programmers are highly literate all-around, and I wish to be the same.

Something I remember very distinctly from my school days is how difficult I found writing text of any length at all. I can’t imagine I am alone in this, as minimum lengths seem to be the bane of many school children and there is no end to the tricks they have come up to whittle them down. I have at various times used typographic ploys such as messing with fonts, margins, and line spacing, and rhetorical ploys such as repetition, bulky phrases, and others.

In second grade, we were given the idea to keep a summer journal tracking what we did outside of school. Being young and stupid, I let my mother find out about this. She thought it was a great idea. For the first two weeks of summer, I wrote a journal entry every day. It was boring and hard. Being young, I was easily distracted, so I could be “working” on a journal entry for an hour and have what might generously be called a paragraph to show for it. After the initial two weeks, the schedule went to every other day. The week after that only produced one entry. After a month of trying, my mother didn’t even bother reminding me.

In high school, I also struggled with writing. We had these four page papers for history class. I remember I would struggle with them for hours. I got good grades, but I would always feel confused when my classmates would talk about how they started those papers the night before they were due and got similar or better grades than me. I simply didn’t feel like I could produce words on command like that. Since I can remember, I have difficulty producing words on a page the same way I can talk articulately for a long time.

However, the bright side to all this is that, as I have grown up, writing has gotten easier. Part of this is simply because I have learned better discipline. One problem that would plague me constantly when I was younger was the inability to separate writing and editing. I would spend as much as half an hour on figuring out the best way to phrase a single sentence. This made progress glacial. I learned that my biggest barrier to writing was learning how to let the words flow and edit later if the result really needed editing. This is why I think this blog and other informal writing I have done has been better practice than all the school papers ever were.

But I can’t credit all of the improvement in my ability to write simply to practice. There is also the substantial issue that I have much more life experience to write about. I know this is a substantial effect because I feel like, even during periods where I had very little writing to do, it got easier just because I knew more about many different topics. I could make connections between different ideas. Ability to write meaningfully is about the ability to connect with the audience, and having a wider experience from age helps with that.

Considering these two factors raises the question in the title: How does writing get easier? I listed two factors, more practice and more life experience. I could break each of them down far more, but that isn’t the point. The point is that writing feels much easier to me now than when I was younger, and I question if the most important factor was mainly the practice or the life experience. If it was mostly the life experience, then the struggles with this in school were worthless. If it was mostly the practice, then I should have written more for personal reasons. The question also matters because I want to write much more and better in the future, and I don’t know where to target my efforts to make it easy.

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