I haven’t been to the gym in a long time.

David Eaves, a person I have immense amounts of respect for, has been using a tag line related to this title/intro on his blog for quite a while, probably longer than I’ve known him.  And I honestly never gave much thought to the idea that writing really is a muscle until recently. I’ve taken a break from being a designer (or a programmer) to work as a product manager for over a year now. Designing and coding require a set of skills I’m very familiar with, code is an interpretive language that people use to communicate with each other about the details of commands they issue a computer. While design is a more visual language of storytelling, heavily using imagery and some text to convey the journey of a user to the team intent on correctly interacting with that user.  Both pursuits are about communication but each uses written language in a very different way.  As a product manager I’m forced to lean on my skills as a writer and I don’t think I had much in the way of skills previously but whatever bedridden muscles have been dormant are reawakening as I realize how young and foolish I really was to ignore this essential form of communication.

I’m hoping there is more to come, perhaps starting with some tech posts about recent projects while I try to grapple with this idea of writing more than a tweet.

http://clarkbw.net/blog/2015/02/09/if-writing-is-a-muscle/