Improve Engineering skills — Part 1: Communication & Writing
This year I want to improve my engineering skills. As I see myself as a solution builder and want to make this a reality this year 🙂I looked at the skills that are core to solution building and find a good starting point. I found the following important steps to build a solution:
- Identify the problem
- Generate a data-driven hypothesis
- Build and test the product (hypothesis)
- Collaborate with customers, team members, and the community
Based on the steps I decided to start by improving my writing skills. All steps in building a solution need communication skills. Many friends and role models told me the best way to improve communication is writing. Writing allows you to work at your own pace and focus on content and simplicity. Further you can easier check and improve the results.
After some research I selected the Google technical writer training. The course is well structured, has proven effective at Google and includes the basics. You can finish the course in less than 3 hours. Before picking the course I evaluated another course on Coursera and blog posts on writing for remote workers.
From the course I identified 10 topics I want to improve as a first step. To learn more effectively I chose specific topics to implement in the coming weeks. The 10 writing improvements I implement are:
Use terms consistently
Replace disambiguate pronouns with the noun
- this/that
- it, they, them, and their
Choose strong verbs
- forms of be: is, are, am, was, were, etc.
- occur
- happen
Reduce “there is/there are”
- Delete it or find a better subject
- Better: You should know
Focus each sentence on a single idea
Eliminate or reduce extraneous words
- at this point in time → now
- determine the location of → find
- is able to → can
Reduce subordinate clauses (optional)
- Split in two sentences if the subordinate clause branches off into a sperate idea.
Focus each paragraph on a single topic
Answer what, why, and how
- What are you trying to tell your reader?
- Why is it important for the reader to know this?
- How should the reader use this knowledge? Alternatively, how should the reader know your point to be true?
Prefer active voice to passive voice
I will apply those topics to writing more blog posts. Blogging helps me train these fundamentals. I hope you enjoy the posts and constructive feedback is always welcome. Thank you 🙏
You can plan with a follow-up post with my next learnings soon 😊 Future posts will tackle more technical topics. I have plans on writing about Brushing up on Computer Science and Bootstrapping products through APIs & services in regulated industries.
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