Sushmitha Kanukurthi, a good friend (and asker of difficult questions!) left this comment on last Friday’s post:

I wish you would elaborate on what it means to be a good communicator … how do you articulate effectively for e.g.?

Nice, easy, no-pressure question to tackle on a Friday morning! 🙂

But let’s go ahead and try and break it down:

1. One way to think about communication – you have a structure of interlinked thoughts in your head, and you want to transfer it into someone else’s head.
   
2. Before you begin this transfer, which is bloody hard, it would help to have your own structure as clearly constructed, and as simply constructed as possible.
   
3. At the risk of being a little meta: I have thoughts about what makes a good communicator in my head, and I would like to transfer these thoughts into your head, via this post. This post thus becomes the transference mechanism.
   
4. Writing this post is difficult enough. But boss, it would be a lot easier if I was clear in my own head about the topic! Also: being clear about it is different from being “right” about it. That’s a whole other topic, and we’re not getting into it today.
   
5. So that’s the first requirement of being a good communicator: being clear in your own head about the topic at hand.
   
6. Now, this is where the whole thing becomes tricky, and you’d do well to pay attention: over time, you realize that the best way to be clear in your own head about a topic is by writing it down.
   
   1. This is not me dispensing gyaan. This is me quoting other folks. I just happen to be in complete agreement.
      
   2. This is the quote: “The Arabs have an expression for trenchant prose: no skill to understand it, mastery to write it.”
      
   3. So if you’re asking how to be a better writer, it is about thinking clearly. If you’re asking how to think clearly, write. The bottomline: start writing.
      
7. Don’t worry about whether it is badly written or not. Don’t worry about whether it makes sense or not. In fact, you’re guaranteed less than desirable quality the first few times.
   
8. No, I’m not going to quantify the word “few”. It would be a very boring world if the answer were to be the same for all of us. But forget about quality, just write.
   It is like learning how to ride a bicycle. We all struggle the first (ahem) few times, and then it comes naturally. But we all have to stumble the first few times, now what to do.
   
9. After the first few times, start to worry about “better”. And better is often about removing the bad parts from your essay, rather than trying to add the good stuff in. A sparse, elegant essay isn’t written at the first go. It is what is left at the end of ruthless editing. Write a first draft out, and force yourself to cut it down to 2/3 of the original length. What you’ll be left with will be good communication.
   And if you are the kind of person who is hard on yourself, find solace in this: it may not be good by your standards, but it will be better than the first draft.
   
10. Writing is a form of teaching, and teaching forces you to be clear about stuff you are thinking about. Write, therefore with an audience in mind, and that audience is your student. Will your student have learnt for reading what you have written? If not, re-write. If yes, stop rewriting.
    
11. Practice. Practice everyday. Everyday you get a little bit better. Have you ever experienced that feeling of surprise at the end of a long walk on the beach, when you glance back and see how far you’ve come? Your writing today won’t be much better than your writing yesterday, but your writing today will be much better than your writing was on the 11th of June, 2020.
    So long as you wrote everyday between that day and today, of course 🙂

That would be my answer to Sushmitha’s question. I wish (for my own sake) that I had an easier answer!