Writing Tips for Programmers (Who Are Still Learning English)
From a Better Programming editor
With 25% of programming jobs in the United States being done by foreign-born workers, many programmers speak English as a second language. Computer science is one career where, at least in some areas, you can get quite far without perfect English. Of course, you need to be able to communicate effectively with colleagues, but a brilliant coder with mediocre English writing skills is still a brilliant coder.
But as your career advances, being able to write well will open up new professional avenues. Writing an article for a professional journal or magazine, or even just the company blog, can give a huge boost to your profile.
Here are a few tips for programmers who want to improve their written English.
Don’t Let Your Fears Hold You Back
Your own fear is always the biggest barrier to learning something new. Lack of confidence is understandable when you’re struggling with a second language. The anxiety around being misunderstood or making yourself look foolish can be overwhelming. It is tempting to just stick to writing the language you know best (JavaScript, Swift, C+, or whatever).
But if you’ve been putting off writing something in a professional context, now is the time to get on with it. You will never improve unless you start.
Start Small
If you feel overwhelmed, think of a manageable (meaning short) written project you can work towards. A simple guide or tutorial to a process is a good one to start with as it has a clear structure and aim — map these out first and then you can focus on the language in the piece. The language should be simple. The best way to ensure you keep your language simple is to keep your sentences short…
Keep Your Sentences Short
The less confident you are with writing English the more important it is that you keep your sentences short. The longer your sentence is, the harder it is for you to spot errors and the easier it is for the reader to get confused.
Long sentences aren’t always bad. The best writing usually has long sentences as well as short ones. But most long sentences need to be crafted — carefully having their word order tweaked — so that they’re as clear and easy to understand as possible. That’s OK for a confident, skilled writer, but it’s best avoided if you are even an advanced English language learner.
How long is too long? Aim for a maximum of around 30 words. Most sentences should have much fewer. To give you an idea, no sentence in this piece so far has been longer than 30 words.
Read a lot…but not just anything
You’re here, reading this piece on Medium so you obviously read…but you probably need to read more.
If you speak English all day at work and read emails, messages and so on, your writing will get better — your vocabulary will increase and you will make fewer grammatical errors. But you will also learn bad habits and write the way people speak, which is not usually appropriate.
Without reading long-form articles, technical articles, professional blogs in your area, books — you won’t learn to recognize and then copy their various writing styles.
Ask a Native Speaker to Edit Your Work
Having a native English speaker edit your work is one of the most useful things that you can do to improve your writing. However, in order to really benefit and learn from the process, you need to do a close comparison of your original piece and the edit.
If you can sit down with an English speaking colleague (and a decent writer) then that’s perfect — they can talk you through your mistakes. It’s more likely, however, that you just get an edited version of your piece back. In that case, you can use Word or Google docs to compare the two versions.
You can also do this if you have a piece accepted by Better Programming. After your piece has been edited, copy it into a Word or Google document. Then click on the three dots on the top right of your Medium post and select Version History. Find the last version of your piece before it was edited by us and copy that content into a second Word or Google doc. You can then use the Compare Document feature in Word or Google Docs to create a third document, which is your original version with all the edits marked up in red.
Go through the edits one by one. Note down any edits that appear more than once. Try to understand why each change has been made. If you can’t work it out, ask someone else to look at them with you.
Not all the edits will be correcting an error. Some of them will be because something you wrote just sounded not right to an English speaker. This is probably the hardest thing about speaking and writing a foreign language and only experience can improve it. There is not a great deal of logic in what “sounds right” in English. Even if you could talk to your editor they probably couldn’t tell you much more than “it just reads better this way.” So just make a note and try to remember how to say it next time.
Rise Above the Plateau
If you’re already working on an English-speaking team you obviously have acceptable English skills for your role. The problem with reaching a sufficient level of spoken English (i.e. good enough for the role) is that people tend to stop correcting you. You keep making the same mistakes in your speech but nobody minds because they’re used to it and they can understand you. As a result, you stop improving: You’ve reached the dreaded language learning plateau.
One way to keep yourself progressing with language is to tell your colleagues that you’re still learning and that you appreciate being corrected — they may not be saying anything so as to not offend you.
But another effective approach is to concentrate on writing. Mistakes that nobody would notice or mind when spoken are totally unacceptable in writing. Writing is a challenge and in order to improve you need to challenge yourself. So, rise above the language learning plateau and get writing!
Ask For Corrections In Real-Time
One of the best ways to improve at anything is to get real-time feedback. Asking your teammates to correct your English close to the time of the mistake can be a big learning opportunity. It allows you to have the context of your mistake fresh in your head so can learn from it next time.
If you’re correcting someone else, make sure to be kind and respectful and remember that everyone is just trying their best.
