Five ways writing enhances professional success
A friend of mine who is a performance and intelligence consultant (i.e., crunches numbers then tells executives how to recruit, plan, and deploy budgets) told me his recent posting is likely to be extended because recruitment efforts have come up nil.
“They need someone who can do the high-level data and tech analysis, plus stratigic planning, plus communicate with stakeholders and the public,” he said. “They keep finding people who can do one thing, but not all three.”
This illustrates something that I’ve heard from professionals across industries: specialization and niche skills are an asset at entry- to mid-level positions but ascent to senior roles requires communication, creative and strategic capabilities that many people simply haven’t developed.
Writing is arguably the most effective, certainly the most accessible, means of developing these critical capacities. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, even fields like pure mathematics, the most successful practitioners are the ones with the strongest communication skills.
Writing promotes career success in five key ways:
Audience awareness
One of the first and most vital skills writing teaches is how to address an audience. From scribbled childhood Valentines or thank-you notes, to book reports, to emails, to academic essays, to applications, writing is a constant discourse with others.
Even youngsters who have never had explicit instruction in writing for an audience quickly learn to adjust their tone and style depending on the class and task.
Direct instruction helps students expand their understand of audience, hence their communication skills. I teach my secondary students about demographics and psychographics, how to identify an audience through textual analysis, how to construct an audience for an argument.
This benefits their writing, of course, but it also promotes cognitive empathy (an especially important skill for 2e learners) by encouraging them to reflect on other people’s attitudes, perspectives and desires.
Organization
One of the most powerful skills writing (and reading) develops is organization. Even pre-literate children learn that words follow a certain order (e.g., left to right, top to bottom) in their language; they learn that stories have a beginning middle and end.
Once they start writing, they replicate these basic organizational principles and learn new ones: greetings go at the start of a letter/email/text, courtesies at the end; introductions come before evidence come before conclusions, etc.
With every increase in sophistication and complexity, writing demands more careful construction. Thus learners are continuously refining their ability to assess, sort and apply information, skills which are crucial to any professional undertaking.
Argumentation
Writing — particularly essays and creative writing — develops invaluable argumentation skills. The step from organization to argumentation is huge: I encounter many students who can competently wrangle information, but haven’t yet learned to use it to persuade.
Argumentation demands higher-level thinking; it requires students to see the whole landscape of a thing, identify the details that matter to their claim, then shape them into a persuasive text.
Students who master argumentation become adults who get the jobs they apply for, get their start-ups funded, get the raises they want, etc.
Linguistic dexterity
Writing is the perfect way to hone linguistic dexterity. People may claim that substance trumps style when it comes to communication, but having a broad vocabulary and strong grasp of semantics, discourse and pragmatics never hurt.
Let me put it another way: we wouldn’t still read The Gettysburg Address if it weren’t a masterpiece of rhetoric, and nobody would quote Dr. King if, instead of “I have a dream” he’d said, “like, it would probably be cool if people were nicer to each other.”
Attention to detail
One cannot write well without paying attention. Even a text message (including those in txt spk) requires continuous decision-making to construct meaning: full stop or exclamation mark? Small smiley or tooth-bared grin? One or two kisses?
The correct use of spelling, capitalization, punctuation (aka orthography) requires the brain to manage individual tasks in the context of a larger goal (i.e., I will capitalize this word because my reader needs to see where the sentence begins; a comma here will indicate the relationship between part A and part B of my sentence).
Again, as writing increases in complexity, the cognitive demands ramp up exponentially. A student who can write a cohesive, coherent five paragraph essay has performed a spectacular intellectual feat — a fact we should remember and celebrate.
Writing is hard. The brain has to summon and coordinate multiple neural systems
to produce so much as one readable sentence.
It is exactly this complexity that makes writing the ideal tool to build the broad-spectrum skills essential to professional success.