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In 2023 where servers are cheap and platforms are free, it’s ridiculously easy for anyone to set up a blog and start flinging words at the web. You can become a “blogger” in the time it takes for Starbucks to make your low-fat half soy milk decaf mocha cherry mint latte frappuccino.

There’s no one out there stopping you. Not Bill Zuckerberg, Elon Gates, or your high school English teacher who told you that you’d probably have done better in class if you’d stopped with the run-on sentences which you would’ve learned about if you’d managed to stay awake in class but couldn’t due to undiagnosed narcolepsy¹.

And if there’s no one out there to stop you from writing, that means you’re gonna going to have to learn how to write good well all by yourself. And that’s why writing well is akshually very hard.

There’s writing, and then there’s writing

I double-majored in French and Spanish and had a rotating third major that went from business to economics to criminal justice. I got a ridiculous amount of practice in multiple languages writing the very standard 5-part composition.

I knew how to write in that 5-part composition because that’s what I was taught in high school:

• Write an introduction where you say what you’re gonna say
• Say the stuff and keep it between 3 and 5 points
• Write the conclusion where you say what you said
• Don’t forget:
  • set the font-size to 12pt
  • double-space after a period
  • set your line-height to 1.5
  • keep paragraphs between 3 and 5 sentences
  • check your grammar
  • stay within the required minimum/maximum word/page count

What I wasn’t taught in high school or college was that this was writing, not Writing™ . More accurately, it’s composition.

You know what my high school English teacher never taught me about composition?

It’s so boring that the only ones who want to read that kind of writing are college professors.

The kind of writing we see every day is nothing like what we were taught to do

Did you notice how at the very beginning I straight-up told you the whole-ass point of this article?

I did:

And if there’s no one out there to stop you from writing, that means you’re gonna going to have to learn how to write good well all by yourself. And that’s why writing well is akshually very hard.

Me, a few minutes ago

That’s part of what is called the “inverted pyramid” that’s common in journalistic writing. Journalists are taught to write the important thing first, fill in some details, and then wrap it up with some background info and other neat facts.

I wasn’t taught to write that way. My friends weren’t taught to write that way. Not a single professor in college told me, “You have 100 words to get to the point and then maybe I’ll read the rest if I’m really feeling it.”

Even our job-specific kinds of writing is nothing like we learned in school

Status emails

I got my first web-related job in 2008. I remember sending my boss an email summarizing my activities for the week. He… was less-than-pleased:

Frank, buddy. I’m not reading your emails.

What !? Why? You asked for a status

Yeah you’re writing me paragraphs. I’ve got to take what you tell me and give it to my boss, who’s got to take it and give it to his boss.

But I did a lot of stuff. How am I supposed to explain that?

Bullet points. Send me bullet points. List out the things you did. Be brief

And that was how I learned to communicate with my supervisors, project managers, and co-workers about tasks.

And if you’re thinking, “Geeze Frank, that should’ve been obvious,” allow me to explain why it wasn’t.

Customer emails

You see, I’d previously worked in the call center. Answering questions about products. Very detailed questions about products. I received high praise from customers and from R&D for my detailed and easy-to-understand emails.

The compositional structure I’d learned in college turned out to be great for explaining right and left-hand enantiomers and why that means that the L in l-carnitine makes it perfectly safe for human consumption. People who want detailed explanations of products like… detailed explanations of products.

The compositional structure was not good for explaining, “I did three things yesterday. Today I will do four things. I cannot do five things because I’m spending time writing this email.”

Software design documentation

Before I was fully established as a web developer, I was a business analyst. My job was to write down how a piece of software needed to work so that a programmer could read it and make the software that did the things I said it should do.

This kind of output was “requirements”. And there were many types of requirements that I wrote:

• Business Requirements to enumerate the practices of … a business
• Functional requirements that explain at a high level how software functions
• Technical Requirements that essentially tell programmers how to do their jobs
• Architectural requirements to outline how a collection of different programs and things fit together to make the software

I was fortunate to have learned this from people who’d already been there. They shared their documents and templates and I just copied the style. And if you’ve never seen these kinds of documents, good, you can still find Jesus.

This isn’t a compositional style. This isn’t email etiquette. This is a domain-specific kind of writing that looks like bullet points and numbered lists are in a battle to the death.

Developer documentation

So, get this: programmers/developers sometimes have to explain to other programmers how to use their programs.

And you know what they don’t teach in computer science classes? How to do that.

This is one of the greatest ongoing struggles in software development today, too. Writing documentation for your code is way less fun that writing the code so the documentation tends to suck.

But if you manage to find a developer with the time or energy to document their stuff, hooray. It’ll look totally different in style from software design documentation, which looks different from status emails, which is different from customer emails, which means…

Job-specific writing is different, but the same

Regardless of these kinds of output, or others, we can say that this kind of writing differs in four-ish ways:

1. Function
2. Audience
3. Presentation
4. Medium

Sure, a customer email about product ingredients isn’t a functional spec for a content management system. But they’re similar because they are both writings communicated to a specific audience with a mutually understood purpose with an expected presentation and in a mutually agreed-upon medium.

The difference between writing and Writing is function

The compositional style that we learned in primary school, used in undergrad, and tried to unlearn at work is fundamentally information-centric in function. The purpose is strictly to transmit information.

But the style we see in journalism, copywriting, scripts, novels, short stories, poems, and songs is about connection. And that is Writing.

Writing to connect is a craft. It requires the study of human nature, culture, language, and style because in order to do it well we must know people very well.

We are not taught the craft of writing and that’s why it’s hard to write well

You might be the best person in the world at dropping 5-syllable words in 45-word sentences with a Flesch-Kinkaid reading score that equals your IQ².

But you can still be a shit Writer because you are not connecting with your audience.

There are lots of people on the internet slinging words at people like they’d throw pennies at pigeons; sure the words are worth something but clearly they’re being yeeted by an asshole. No one’s gonna stick around for anything but the possibility of making some sense cents out of what’s being said.

That’s because said penny-yeeting-asshole is not making any attempt to connect. And I cannot stress this enough:

You have to connect with your audience

It doesn’t matter if your audience is a male aged 35-55 visiting a business page for the first time or if it’s a 60 year old widowed woman who wants to read some spicy werewolf fiction. Your goal is to meet that person on some sort of emotional level.

Because what connects people is their emotions; their humanity.

Writing well requires understanding not just that humans are literate information consumers, but creative beings with deep thoughts and feelings who crave connection.

It is hard to connect to people through words

When I started blogging 13 years ago I wrote in the good ol’ gen-x learned and taught compositional style. Lots of words in long boring sentences collected in long boring paragraphs.

I was writing to get information out. Not to connect. And it showed.

Good grief does it show.

What was I thinking?

In the course of 13 years, 217 blog posts, 600+ Quora answers³, 10k + tweets⁴ I have slowly learned how I can connect:

• Writing in a more narrative, story-telly kinda format
• Being lax with grammar and writing closer to how I speak by using words like kinda, gonna, and story-telly
• Selectively choosing profanity instead of avoiding it because, gosh darn it, I need to emote like a damned human
• Using lots of headings to make it easier to skim and to help me establish what it is I’m writing next
• Leaning into humor, particularly sarcasm

This isn’t how I think everyone should connect to people. It is how I know I connect to people.

In order to connect with people, you must know your own voice

Those attributes that I described above are my own voice. Are they all uniquely mine? No. But I am uniquely all of those things.

Whether it’s a copywriter, a novelist, poet, or screenwriter, they are people who are aware of what makes their writing uniquely theirs and how it helps them connect.

Copywriters and ghost writers have an exceptional talent in this regard because not only must they know their own voice, but they must know the voice of their employer, too. And not only must they know how to separate these voices, they have to intentionally adopt someone else’s. ⁵

Writing well is really hard

I wrote my first story when I was nine. My first poem when I was thirteen. My first song when I was fourteen, and countless short stories, only a handful of which I’ve ever shared. I have written half a dozen chapter ones, three diary entries of an elf, and only half of a novel (about 24 chapters so far).

And that’s in addition to all of the documents, developer documentation, blog posts, press releases and web copy over the years.

I’ve learned that I have little tolerance for writing on the web that doesn’t bother to connect with me. Content that connects is content I’ll come back to.

I am not an expert on Writing. But I know that it’s taken me years to learn my own voice so that I can be a better Writer.

If you’re out there, slinging words out on to the web like pennies at pigeons, stop, take a step back, and consider how you might instead connect with those consuming what you’re saying through your own unique voice. And if you don’t know what your voice is, do the hard work of figuring it out.

Pigeons can be friendly, after all.