Most of my peers, and likely yours as well, work in some sort of technical field. Odds are that they’re proficient readers who can digest the driest of technical material. They’re probably good with math, and a large portion of them are likely science geeks. How many of them can write? I’m not talking about writing their name on their homework, I’m talking about writing clear, concise emails, or meeting agendas, or technical documentation. I’ll bet most of them stink at writing, and that’s wasting money, wasting time, and possibly hurting their paycheck.

Consider the following email:

This message arrives in a mailbox shared by the DBA team. That team supports multiple applications spread across a dozen production and non-production environments, a few dozen servers, close to one hundred databases. One can surmise from the above email that in one of these databases a query is performing poorly, and the sender of the email is asking to have statistics updated.

• What query?
• What application?
• Is this production? Development? QA?
• Which server?
• Which database?
• How did you determine that statistics are the problem?
• Oh, DBA Joe has done this before? Good to know.

Eventually this will get resolved, but only after much back-and-forth between a DBA and the sender of the email. Valuable time is wasted by the DBA, which translates to money wasted. Meanwhile, the application performance continues to suffer, affecting end-users and their productivity. The costs keep piling up.

All of this could have been avoided if the sender had written a better email. Explain that this is a production problem, involving the customer search function on the Widget Sales web page. Also mention that the last time this happened, DBA Joe resolved the problem. DBA Joe would be a good place to start.

Another way in which poor writing wastes time is through unnecessary meetings. How many hour-long meetings have you sat through, only to walk away thinking “that could have been handled via email in 5 minutes”? Too many. Too many people are incapable of expressing themselves in writing, so they schedule a meeting to “discuss” the issue at hand, sometimes inviting eight or ten people, six of whom have no connection to the issue whatsoever. More time wasted, more money wasted.

I’ll admit I’m biased. I hate meetings, and I am easily annoyed by people who waste my time. I also like writing and explaining things in written form. If this blog isn’t proof enough of that, ask any of my coworkers who have been on the receiving end of one of my “here’s what happened” emails. Writing makes you visible, and written words aren’t lost as easily as spoken words. You always search for a past email, but you can’t search for a spoken conversation from six months ago.

Writing forces you to think about your message. Good writing helps to clarify that message.

Good writing may also boost your paycheck. Here’s an interesting infographic from Grammarly.com that makes a couple of interesting claims:

• IT professionals (that’s us, folks) are worse writers than any other profession
• better writers earn more money, regardless of profession

Something to think about…