I recently started writing a white paper for a client at work and realized that I was having a hard time turning my outline and bullet points into complete sentences and paragraphs. Part of this due to the lack of doing any serious writing in a while. Sure I’ve done documentation, use cases, and some formal E-mails, but to actually sit down and draft a multi-page paper on a set topic is just something I haven’t done in years. Writing is a skill that unless practiced regularly falls by the wayside and mine has fallen.
I also think that another culprit in the deterioration of my writing skills is twitter. With its 140 character limit, twitter forces you to think in statements, rather than complete thoughts. Its useful as a tool to get those statements out to friends, but after a while all your thoughts start to limit themselves to those 140 characters. As a tool, I sometimes need to put twitter back in the toolbox and use something else so that I don’t become too dependant.
My aikido sensei used to always say, “if you use a hammer long enough, everything starts to look like a nail”.