On Writing Well

A couple of years back, I taught a class on writing well.

My students were super smart engineers, who happened to write poorly. The aim wasn’t to turn them into brilliant storytellers, but rather, to ensure that they could communicate their ideas clearly. Because it doesn’t matter if you’re the most brilliant scientist to ever live. If you can’t impart your ideas with the written word, your reach will be limited to the number of people you can personally talk to and your ideas will die with you.

I’ve been thinking about that class a lot lately. I enjoyed teaching it, but more than that, I found a deep satisfaction in turning poor writers into capable ones. If I managed to teach one person that quotation marks should never be used for emphasis, I will have left this world a little better than I found it.

Inspired by this experience, I’m considering creating a downloadable cheat sheet of writing tips, something that could be easily shared and sent to coworkers to help them write well. It would be the kind of thing that a supervisor could send to someone whose written communications could use a little polish. It would be aimed at smart people who, for whatever reason, simply never learned to put their periods inside the quotation marks.

I might even set this up as a service. Say you have a smart coworker who can’t write for shit. You could send me their email, and I would send them the guide with a note that someone cared enough about their career to ask me to help them out.

If you work in an office, and tend toward grammar nerdery, you’ve probably cringed at the writing of a co-worker. What are your biggest pet peeves? What would you include in a writing cheat sheet like the one I’m describing? You can leave a comment here, or hit me up on Facebook or Twitter. I won’t tell your coworkers, promise.