On Writing

Lately I've been trying to get back into writing (when I was growing up, writing was a passion of mine). Like many things, the hardest part is getting started. To help get myself past the writer's block, I've been thinking about the question words I learned in school: who, what, where, when, why, and (sometimes) how. A piece of writing can be good without answering all of them, but they can help for brainstorming. This post serves as a presentation of my thoughts about them as well as a cheatsheet for future "not sure what to write" me.

Who

Who are you writing for?

In my day-to-day as a software developer, I'm keen on the idea that knowing the user is important. The same holds true for writing. Understanding the person who I am writing for can help motivate what I write as well as how to write it most effectively. Writing for myself? I don't care if there are a few typos or grammatically-incorrect parts. Writing for fellow developers? Hopefully not so many of those. Writing for my parents? Maybe cut out some of the memes.

What

What are you writing about?

This one may be obvious, it's often the first thing I think about when I'm driven to write something, but it's still worth clearly articulating what I want to convey. Doing so includes covering the problem/situation/etc. that I'm writing about, the scope of what will be covered, as well as what I want my reader to walk away knowing, questioning, and/or doing.

Where

Where is this relevant?

I find this question harder to pin down than the others. At least in technical writing, it makes more sense to me to think of this as a question about figurative locations (e.g. "with this architecture") vs. literal ones (e.g. "in the library").

When

When does this come up?

Closely related to the where question, when is this thing I'm writing about important? When should one expect to encounter it? Sometimes a counter example helps here, for example when it doesn't make sense to use a pattern I'm presenting.

Why

Why does this topic exist? Why am I writing about it? Why should anyone care? Why is it better/worse than prior solutions?

If you've ever played the game where you ask your friend a question and then proceed to reply to all of their comments with simply "why", you recognize how powerful this word is. It bundles all of the answers to all of the questions above, plus adds in a few considerations of its own.

How

How does one use the information presented?

I admit I rely on this one too much. To me, it's a "safer" question to answer because it's easy to write a "how to" tutorial without having to polish and present my personal opinion. There is definitely a time and a place for the style of writing that only answers "how" (I'm thinking tutorials such as quick start guides, code comments, etc.), but it's also a good example of where combining the question words here and their answers can amplify their effectiveness.

Conclusion

The main goal of this post was to get my ideas out there to help unblock me from future writing. One of the cool things about using these questions as a guide is that it's flexible. I've especially proven this to myself by writing tutorial posts that almost exclusively answer "how" without much regard for the others. Beyond that, the questions can also be used as a rubric for grading your own writing. Put another way, did you answer all of the questions you outlined during brainstorming?