Writing well to engage your audience

One graduates from Bachelor of Physics, and taking Physics in the first place, not only to pursue an interesting topic, but to escape the "life-and-death situation" of... writing essays.

Writing has never been one's strength. In high school, A Level General Paper (GP) is a requirement, and one barely passed (50-60% to be more exact). O Level English though, one hits 80+%, and my GP teacher used to tell me, "I didn't know how you got that". Neither do I.

Having proud of one's bad English (my stupidity) and never bother taking the effort to improves it, it never improves well. One chose Physics between a choice of Physics, Computer science, and Mathematics. During one's first year, there's a module called "Developing Effective Communication" (which we termed "DevCom"), which is a compulsory module that you need to pass to continue to next level of studies (Level 1 is first year, Level 2 usually second, and if you can't pass, you can't go to Level 2). That was a nightmare.

As you might have guessed, my marks wasn't so good; though one passes the module, the result wasn't extraordinary; it was below average. One project, one was expected to write some learning materials for an audience that wasn't specified clearly, but they expected you to write for a reasonable audience (high school), and one wrote something that suits more for kids. Group presentations are better, other people tends to pull one's mark up "to the average line". Great!

It wasn't until my last year in College, when one have nothing to do and started learning machine learning from Fast.ai, that one was asked to write a blog about. Writing a blog wasn't necessary. The course was self-taught anyways, and no one is going to monitor oneself if one ever wrote (or ever not write) a single blog post. One had a go for it, it wasn't the best post. In fact, one's first post about fastai was about how to do batch prediction with images, a really short blog that would take you 30 seconds to read. And the first ever post one had written was about setting up a VM on Datacrunch.io, and the only audience one can say is oneself, as one always delete the instance (to save money wasted on storage space) and re-setup when required. It wasn't the best English.

As one started reading more and more, one found out that "writing well" wasn't a new concept. Jason Fried and DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson) shared in their book Remote: Office Not Required titled "On Writing Well" its importance. Some other books they wrote reflects similar viewpoint. They also share a myriad of books you could refer to on writing good English, be sure to check it out! One of the book is:

The Elements of Style by William Strunk J.R.

Nowadays, one agrees that writing well means communicating important information smoothly. Bob might be a great programmer, but if he does not know how to express himself in words that could easily be understood by layman, most people wouldn't bother about what he said. Remember the last time you went to a lecture (provided you're not in the "good English" stream)? How did the professor explains the material to you? Write a bunch of equations on the board and say, "This is how it works. Try to understand it, and see how it relates to each other. That's all from me, thank you."? Do you fell asleep during such lectures?

An Example

Let's look at an example in computer programming. Each "Teacher <number>" means a new viewpoint. To contrast it, one might exaggerate somewhat; though you can de-exaggerate it within your head.

a = 3;
b = 2;
a = b;

What is a?

Teacher 1: a is 2. If you don't believe, try running the program yourself. (End of story)

Ok, that wasn't a good explanation. Let's try it again.

Teacher 2: Let's explain it with pointers. (Here we add some technical explanations, but they aren't necessary).

These are the original values. The value 3 and 2 are stored inside a memory location in your RAM, and a and b is just a pointer to point to that particular memory location that stores the real value. a and b doesn't store the value per se, they refer to the actual value you tell it to save somewhere else. When you performs a = b, you're basically changing where your pointer points at (some programming language makes it clearer with a -> b):

So a now points to b which points to 2, hence a = 2. But if b now points to 3, then a = b = 3.

a = 3;
b = 2;
a = b;
b = 3;

Perhaps one could simplify the explanation by excluding the "memory block" and "RAM" from the explanation. After writing this, one thought it's too simple to simplify, so let's try explaining something harder to show the strength of communicating well.

Another More Complex Example

Consider this block of code that converts a student's mark to grade.

mark = 100;

if      mark >= 90: print("A");
else if mark >= 80: print("B");
else if mark >= 70: print("C");
else if mark >= 60: print("D");
else if mark >= 50: print("E");
else             : print("F");

Easy to understand. Now one wants to change the mark.

mark = 180;

What would it print?

Teacher 1 and student who are new to computer science:

"Well, it would print 'A', since it's larger than 90. And if-else block code stops executing during the first block it encounters True."

"No, the program would crash! No marks could be larger than 100. My teacher told us that 100 is the largest you can get. "

"Your teacher is your teacher, not the computer. The computer don't think like your teacher. The computer of course will print 'A'. If you don't believe, try run the program."

The student run the program, and he/she was shocked to found out that marks could be larger than 100.

The same goes for negative marks:

mark = -6;

The dialog is similar, except on arguing computer now print 'F' or crash, and teacher told students that minimum you could get is 0, not negative numbers.

That wasn't very explaining. All it does is leaves the student to experiment and learn himself/herself what is going on, rather than communicated by the teacher to the student. Perhaps the student might end up still not understanding what's going on, but just gives up. How could the teacher explains it in understanding terms?

Teacher 2:

"Well, it would print 'A'. The thing you need to understand is, computer doesn't have an idea of what 'mark' means, like you do. The computer doesn't know that marks should lie between 0-100, you do. If you want the computer to know what you know, you should code it in, like this:

if      mark <= 100 and mark >= 90: print("A");
else if mark <  90  and mark >= 80: print("B");
else if mark <  80  and mark >= 70: print("C");
else if mark <  70  and mark >= 60: print("D");
else if mark <  60  and mark >= 50: print("E");
else if mark <  50  and mark >=  0: print("F");
else:                               print("Mark is invalid.");

"The computer now knows that marks should lie between 0-100. You told it explicitly. Remember that what you understand contains a meaning, but computer takes in meaningless explanations. If you don't tell the computer how it works, the computer won't know. After all, you derived the meaning based on your interaction with marks, the computer don't take exam like you do, so it doesn't know."

Conclusion

Do you find the latter easier to understand? Tell me more in the comments!

In conclusion, writing is important in any field to express oneself. If you don't write well, nobody can understand what you're trying to convey, however great you are in your field. One am still learning, and writing more and more. Comments from readers are feedback to whether one explains it clearly or not, what can be changed, also helps. The speaker should make something clear for the listener to understand, not the listener try hard to understand what he/she expressed. The listener is not obliged to listen to you, and can choose to ignore, if he/she finds your work not in his/her interest; or worse, if he/she cannot understand easily/clearly what you're trying to convey.

To sell your product, start with beautiful frontend; to sell your idea/teachings, start with good writing/communication skills. And to write well, start writing. Thank you.

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(cover photos/thumbnail from Unsplash)