Tom johnson recently blogged on what does it mean to know how to write? protesting the notion that everyone can write, tom proposed a linear scale of increasing writing skill. Lively discussion followed and ellis pratt responded with a blog post assessing writing skills – a response to what does it mean to know how to write? which proposed that writing skills might be plotted on a two dimensional grid. No doubt a proposal in four dimensions cant be far behind, but for now i think there are three components to writing skill.

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Many people may be able to get by with two out of three, but the greats have all three. These components are: grammatical skill, compositional skill, and domain knowledge. By grammatical skill, i dont mean the ability to remember schoolbook grammar rules. It is the ability to construct sentences, not the ability to diagram them, which is necessary for writing.

When people say that everyone can write, i suspect that they mean simply that everyone can construct meaningful sentences and record them on paper. Not quite everyone qualifies to this standard, but in the developed world, most people do. You can, of course, develop and posses a much higher level of grammatical skill than mere literacy requires. A certain elegance, fluidity, and grace in the construction of a sentence is one of the hallmarks of a good writer in all fields.

Isnt compositional skill just an extension of grammatical skill? i dont think so. In his book, story, scriptwriting guru robert mckee writes about his time as a script reader for a movie studio. Sometimes, however, he would find something that was terribly written, but told a wonderful story.

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As mckee said, if he had gone to his boss and said, this script has a great story but we cant use it because the prose is bad, he would have been fired on the spot. And, mckee insists, the ability to write beautiful prose is common the ability to tell a compelling story is rare, and those who have it cant always write beautiful prose. And indeed, if we consult our own experience, im sure we will all remember a great raconteur or someone who was wonderful at teaching you how to do something, but who would blanch at the very idea of putting pen to paper.

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Add to this that there are people on the fiction best seller lists whose prose is adequate at best and stilted at worse,but whose storytelling sells millions of books. Many technical writers would vehemently deny that domain knowledge is a component of writing skill. Some even go so far as to suggest that ignorance of the subject domain is an asset, that it allows them to appreciate the perspective of the user. Yet i am quite sure i have never heard anyone praise a book by saying, this book is great because it is quite clear that the author knows nothing about the subject. Indeed, what people tend to say of the great works of popular exposition on any subject is: it is clear that the author knows their subject extremely well. But domain knowledge is important for other reasons than knowledge of the subject matter, as important as that may be.

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Technical writers often go to great lengths to collect data on their audience, to construct personas so that they have a model of who they are writing for. But there is a great shortcut to knowing your reader, and that is to know the domain in which your reader works. Personas give you a map of the readers footsteps knowing the domain means you have walked the path in their shoes you know the reader not from collected data but from lived experience. Particular domains have compositional conventions that guide how communications in the field are structured. In the domain of cooking, the compositional convention for cooking instructions for a particular dish is well known.

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You will very occasionally see a recipe that is written out as prose with no list of ingredients and no separate steps, but such things are rare. You will virtually never see one published this way they are almost always family recipes being passed on by people with no general interest in cooking. Anyone who is interested in cooking knows how to compose a recipe because recipes have a well known template. This has an important consequence: you can write a bestselling cookbook with no compositional skill at all, and only minimal grammatical skill. You just need to know the template that is part of the domain knowledge of the field.