ENG 111

One of the things keeping me busy lately is that I’m taking an English class. It’s just over at NOVA, the local community college. It’s freshman English composition - how to write a paper. I’ve never been formally taught how to do it. I’m ok with emails and short essays, but I never learned how to plan, structure, and write anything more than a few pages. More and more, that’s becoming a problem.

How did I get through college without taking this class? They didn’t make me, and I didn’t want to. I had good grammar and vocabulary, and a good intuitive grasp of the language. My parents were both well educated, and my mom is English to boot. I was a dorky kid and read a lot. I always did well on standardized tests. They don’t test you on your ability to string together a coherent essay, particularly anything over a couple of pages long. (I’ve heard they’ve gotten better at that, probably in response to people like me slipping through the cracks.) Thanks to the APs, I placed out of the freshman English classes.

I hated high school English, and it hated me right back. It was like frog dissection for books. I read for fun. That’s like watching frogs in the wild, just letting them do their own thing and being surprised and entertained by what they get up to. It really sucks the magic out of it to see them dead, rubbery, and smelling of formaldehyde. I wasn’t going to spend any more time in those classes than I absolutely had to. I figured college English would be more of the same, or worse. When I got the chance to dodge it, I did.

Besides, I liked math. I was good at it - good enough that I could get away with being pretty lazy. I always knew I would do some kind of math or science thing when I got out. By the end of high school, I figured out it would be computer programming. I got to coast through college on that track. Not a lot of writing there. I had some elective classes that I had to write for, but rarely more than three to five pages. When pressed for more, I skimped, padded, and scraped by, or in one particularly shameful case, just dropped the class. I knew that once I got through college, I’d be set - I wouldn’t have to write again.

That was the single dumbest idea ever to cross my mind. It is the Atlas holding up a world of dumb ideas.

I got away with not writing for a while. As a junior programmer, your job is just telling the computer what to do. All of your communications with other people are them telling you what to do. It’s nice and simple, but you don’t want to do that for the rest of your life.

Now, I spend more of my time communicating with people than with computers. I still write code, but I also spend a lot of time writing about code. I have to draft plans and proposals and justifications for software I want to write. I have to spec out requirements. I have to document what it actually ended up doing, and how to use it. I have to tell other programmers how to maintain it. Being willing and able to do all of this gives me more control over my work. Doing a good job of it makes everyone more productive. The users get something more useful, and the developers spend less time spinning their wheels.

I’ve been developing software for a long time. I’ve learned a lot of things the hard way. I’ve made a lot of mistakes, and I’ve seen a lot of other people make mistakes. I’ve seen crazy ideas work and reasonable ideas go horribly awry. I’ve seen successful and failed projects, functional and dysfunctional teams. If I can capture that knowledge and convey it to other developers, I can save them a lot of grief and help them be more effective.

In both of these ways, I’m more useful, more of a net benefit, than I’d be just writing code. That’s a really good thing. If I’m just writing code, I’m competing with kids who live on Red Bull and sleep in their offices. In Bangalore. That’s a dead end, and I have way too many things I’d rather be doing.

In general, I’m becoming less and less interested by purely technical problems. I’m more interested in the social and organizational issues in software development. I’m more concerned about having my software actually solve human problems. Both of those mean working with people, getting inside their heads, figuring out their worlds. All of this means more writing.

Here I’ve been hamstrung. I just don’t have much practice in getting my knowledge and ideas out in writing. I can do it, but it’s a slow, awkward, painful process. This essay, which weighs in at about three pages, took me about six hours to write. I can spend half an hour on a three-paragraph email, trying to get out exactly what I want to say. That’s usually worth the effort, because a miscommunication can easily waste more time than that, but it’s still just dumb. I need to get better at this.

Even more than that, I find myself wanting to write outside of work. I’m studying history and economics and a whole lot of random things about human society, about how the world works, but I’m not sharing what I learn very effectively. I’ll kick some of it around with friends over beer every once in a while, but I don’t get anything out in print. I don’t really nail down what I’m trying to say, and I don’t get real feedback.

If I’m just reading, not writing, what’s the point? Is it really any better than sitting around watching TV? One of the weird things that’s happened as I’ve gotten older is that I’ve developed this craving for a sense of accomplishment. Anyone who knew me in my younger days can vouch that that didn’t used to be true. I could happily noodle along without actually getting anywhere. I could read crap fantasy all day. I could go to movie marathons. I could sleep past 10am with no sense whatsoever that the day was slipping away. Now, around 8:30, this little voice starts up with, “Good heavens, I’m late! I’m late!” I have trouble sitting still for an entire movie. And if I read a book without at least getting a bunch of good conversations out of it, it feels like I’ve hit an air pocket of lost time.

This is also partly because my memory is crap. If I don’t create some artifact to mark the passing of time, it’s just lost. Keeping a paper journal has been good. It lets me map time to a physical object, a stack of pages. “Those four months are in that notebook.” But it’s dead storage. Nobody else is going to read it, and even I haven’t been good at going back to my old journals. It’s also not structured knowledge. It’s just a stream of random data. There are a bunch of good ideas and insights buried in them, but unless I dig them out, polish them up, and put them on display, they’re just marking time. Even then, they’re not all that useful on their own. I really need to pull them together into a coherent structure.

For that, I need to really know how to write. I do ok on short essays, where I can run on instinct, but that only gets me so far. Without knowing how to create a structure, I can’t write anything longer than my attention span. I don’t have to be a brilliant writer. I just have to gain some level of technical competence. And I know that’s a teachable skill. There may be some unquantifiable genius that makes great writers great, but being good is just a matter of technique, practice, and feedback.

I learned this when I took a drawing class in college. I discovered that art isn’t some magical gift. Most of it is techniques that can be taught, and skill and judgment that comes with practice. Sit in class for six hours a week ripping out sketch after sketch and spend another six outside crafting something carefully. Have someone review your stuff and tell you how to make it better. I wasn’t any Michelangelo, but it was encouraging how much I improved over a semester.

Learning to draw also changed the way I looked at the world. It overlays a structure for thinking about what you’re seeing, for figuring out how to represent it. It makes you pay more attention to both details and relations. It makes you more aware of the limits and distortions of your own perception. I hope that a similar thing happens with writing, that practice in putting thoughts into words will form habits that lend structure to this babbling stream of consciousness.

So why don’t I just write more? I’ve known for a while that this is really what I need to do. I’ve heard several authors asked how to become a good writer. They all say, “Read a lot. Write a lot.” Why can’t I just do it? I don’t know. I have crappy self-discipline. There’s always something I’d rather be doing right now. So I need to impose some sort of structure on myself. I need to create some sort of external pressure. I need to have someone who will set deadlines and harsh on me if I don’t make them. (I’ve tried getting friends to do this, but no one has been willing to really bust my chops - I must be too much of a dick.)

So I signed up for ENG 111: College Composition I. The course description promises to impart “the fundamentals of academic writing” - just what I’m looking for. Then I discovered there’s an honors section. Even better - that should move faster and have a lower slacker ratio. When I wrote in for approval to sign up for it, they pointed me to the more specific descriptions of the honors sections. The technical part was the same, but each had its own topic of focus. I had two choices: Tuesday 7:30-10:20 and Thursday 4:30-7:20. I work from home on Thursdays, so both were doable. I had figured that the Tuesday night one was more safely outside work hours, so I’d go for that, all else being equal. All else was not equal. The topic for the Thursday class was Globalization. It would tie in to most of the reading I’ve been doing over the last few years. Awesome. What was the topic for Tuesday night? “The Power of Love.” I would have just shot myself in the face.

I’m three weeks into the class now, and pretty much loving it. We’re a little slow getting started on the writing part, but I think that’ll pick up. So far, we’ve mostly been getting the class organized and coming to grips with the topic. There are about twenty people. It seems like a good group; appropriately international, as you might expect at NOVA, with a wide range of experience and opinions. I should learn a lot, and have a barrel of fun.