1. Get the book "Adios Strunk And White". Strunk And White is a horrible book to learn how to actually write English well. It's full of contradictions, has some bad grammar in it, doesn't follow its own advice, and tries to make English a proscriptive language rather than dynamic like it is. The Adios book basically breaks you out of the S&W mode of thinking and gets you thinking about different forms and techniques you can practice without being proscriptive.
2. Do object writing every day. There's a site http://objectwriting.com/ that has some, but you can also hit http://wordnik.com/random to get a random work. You then try to write for 10 minutes about or with that word using all your senses, including your kinetic and sense of self.
3. Blog something every day. Doesn't matter what it is but spend at least 30 minutes writing about something.
4. Learn about story structure. A good book is "The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller" and should fit the coder mind really well. Another book is Joseph Cambell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" to learn core mythical story structures.
5. Study subtext and context. If this paragraph is about what to study, the subtext is that I think most programmers can't write for shit because they're too logical, and the context is I'm telling people this on hacker news. Universally I find programmers terrible at both subtext and context of the written word.
6. Spend all the rest of your time learning to not censor yourself so that you have a voice that's yours, not the voice you think you should have.
7. Margaret Atwood had the best advice about being blocked. Paraphrased it's, "Blockage is either a problem of voice or structure. If it's voice, change who's telling the story. If it's structure, change the opening scene." She's damn right, but what do you expect from Margaret Atwood? Shitty advice?
8. Try writing in one form as if it's another. For example, write prose like it's poetry. Write poetry like its prose.
9. Get better at describing or saying the absurd. Stare at something and then describe it from unique points of view or in bizarre ways.
10. Keep a notebook and write down every idea you have, then try to make it happen. Also a great thing for songs and poems. I should actually do this more.
One thing I might add is, develop a pipeline for writing (1) don't judge your first draft, (2) schedule time to review each draft and edit ruthlessly, (3) edit once more before publishing.
The most important way I have improved my writing is to give myself permission to just write when working on the first draft. Write without any judgement and trust that the subsequent steps in my workflow will catch any issues and produce polished writing.
Edit: A book recommendation "Weinberg on Writing, the fieldstone method" by Gerald Weinberg. Excellent advice from his experience writing several books as a consultant and technology writer.
I think blogging publicly will get you over the fear of being judged, and doing it in your real name helps even more.
But, that can be a tall order for some people. You don't have to publish everything you write. You could totally write 10 crap articles and publish 1 good one.
One aspect that I think can sometimes be troubling, is whether it's fine to just have a blog that is a miscellaneous collection of stuff covering a variety of topics, versus a blog that is about X, Y or Z at the outset. I guess this is just "the blogger trap" ( http://www.marco.org/2009/04/05/avoiding-the-blogger-trap ), but I get the impression that a blog for a specific subject would have a better reception, versus "I'm just going to write about whatever" which might have less reliability, in a sense.
Strunk And White is a horrible book to learn how to actually write English well. It's full of contradictions, has some bad grammar in it, doesn't follow its own advice
He "is head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh and co-author (with Rodney Huddleston) of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language".
But, go ahead and write like Strunk if you want to sound like a stiff 1890s dandy.
In addition to the "50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice" article that Zed links, Language Log[1] is a great source if you want to learn more about the problems with prescriptivism and Strunk and White in particular. Geoffrey Pullum is one of the founders, and he writes there often.
1. Get the book "Adios Strunk And White". Strunk And White is a horrible book to learn how to actually write English well. It's full of contradictions, has some bad grammar in it, doesn't follow its own advice, and tries to make English a proscriptive language rather than dynamic like it is. The Adios book basically breaks you out of the S&W mode of thinking and gets you thinking about different forms and techniques you can practice without being proscriptive.
2. Do object writing every day. There's a site http://objectwriting.com/ that has some, but you can also hit http://wordnik.com/random to get a random work. You then try to write for 10 minutes about or with that word using all your senses, including your kinetic and sense of self.
3. Blog something every day. Doesn't matter what it is but spend at least 30 minutes writing about something.
4. Learn about story structure. A good book is "The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller" and should fit the coder mind really well. Another book is Joseph Cambell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" to learn core mythical story structures.
5. Study subtext and context. If this paragraph is about what to study, the subtext is that I think most programmers can't write for shit because they're too logical, and the context is I'm telling people this on hacker news. Universally I find programmers terrible at both subtext and context of the written word.
6. Spend all the rest of your time learning to not censor yourself so that you have a voice that's yours, not the voice you think you should have.
7. Margaret Atwood had the best advice about being blocked. Paraphrased it's, "Blockage is either a problem of voice or structure. If it's voice, change who's telling the story. If it's structure, change the opening scene." She's damn right, but what do you expect from Margaret Atwood? Shitty advice?
8. Try writing in one form as if it's another. For example, write prose like it's poetry. Write poetry like its prose.
9. Get better at describing or saying the absurd. Stare at something and then describe it from unique points of view or in bizarre ways.
10. Keep a notebook and write down every idea you have, then try to make it happen. Also a great thing for songs and poems. I should actually do this more.
There ya go.