Tips (and motivation) to improve our written asynchronous communication

This resource first appeared in issue #33 on 17 Jul 2020 and has tags Managing A Team: Documentation/Writing, Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools

4 ways to improve your writing and communication in your free time - Jessica Thiefels
Written communication is remote work super power - Snir David
Asynchronous Communication Builds Respect and Trust - Dexter Sy, Tech Management Life

A lot of us in research and computing ended up here because we preferred working in math or code over writing. But writing is an incredibly useful skill to hone — it helps us communicate with our team now, and with our stakeholders; and it helps develop our career whether through blogging or writing papers that get read.

Jessica Theifel’s article gives us some concrete suggestions about how to improve our writing game - some resources to learn about persuasive writing and for grammar checking, and a couple resources for writing prompts to help get us to practice.

It’s (intentional) practice that really helps improve writing, and the hard part is forcing ourselves to do the practice. (Committing to a weekly newsletter is one particularly extreme way to do it).

As you develop those skills, it will help with your team, too. Working remotely is forcing us into a bunch of new communication practices that, honestly, are going to continue to serve us well even once frequent face-to-face meetings become feasible. One of those practices is not relying so heavily on synchronous communication - which is exhausting when done over Zoom or the equivalent - and more on asynchronous communication, which means writing more frequently and for longer than a one-paragraph email. Snir David’s article points out how useful written communication is for our new remote work life.

And finally Dexter Sy’s article argues that using more asynchronous commuincation can help show your team you trust and respect them - giving them the information they need, caring enough to write it well, and then letting them do their thing rather dripping out information, or virtually tapping on their shoulder and seeming to check in on them routinely.

(Relatedly, this thread on twitter about tech companies hiring for writing skills is interesting).