Writing is harder than you think by Zonker Leave

[OIPWHR-M.T.]

I’m talking from a GNOME perspective but I’m sure this situation is common in most if not all the free software projects: A coincidence? The documentation team needs writers. The marketing team needs writers. The press team needs writers. The web team needs writers. An exception? Translation teams do much better at finding people. A contradiction? Writing is a common skill. Many people publish regularly in a blog. Planet administrators get new requests all the time. There must be something to learn here. There is something to learn, but I don’t think it’s what Gil is suggesting. There’s an enormous difference between blogging and being able to string a few words together and being able to write documentation or marketing material. I see this attitude a lot, that “anybody can write” and it’s totally false. Translation is the exception because it involves much less work for those who are actually fluent in two or more languages. There’s a huge difference between converting a string of text from language A to language B, and doing the research and writing to generate that text in the first place. The fact that Gil conflates tranlsation with documentation demonstrates that he may not really understand the problem fully. Sure, most people are literate, and can compose an email or write a blog entry with little problem. But that doesn’t make them skilled writers. As an editor for Linux.com and NewsForge, I can tell you: Most people do not write well — and I’m not just talking about spelling and grammar. I’m talking about the ability to take a specific topic and develop a coherent article or story that provides the necessary detail and clarity for someone to understand how to do something or to get a full understanding of a topic. A few problems with grammar or spelling (and, of course, house style — but that’s a completely separate topic) are easy enough to fix in the editorial process — but problems with organization, structure, and clarity are another story. It’s also little wonder that GNOME and other projects have a harder time attracting writers than developers. First, the attitude is pretty clear: Anybody can write, but only some people can code. If you look at a project like Debian, for example, its membership process is entirely developer-centric. Second, very few people who write professionally want to spend their off-hours doing more writing, particularly about the same topic they write about professionally. I know I’d like to be doing more for open source, and as a non-programmer, documentation is the main area where I could contribute. Still, even though I enjoy writing, after spending all day at the computer writing and editing articles, the thought of writing more about the same topic (for free) just doesn’t thrill me. Maybe that makes me a bad person, or not as committed to open source as I should be, but there’s a limit to how much time a person can spend doing one thing. There’s also the adage about the cobbler’s children having no shoes… Programmers who contribute to open source projects in their spare time usually do so to advance a project that they use themselves. The benefit is obvious — if a programmer improves GNOME or any other open source project they receive an immediate benefit and potential long term benefits: If I use GNOME and make it better, I get a better GNOME. Plus, as a developer, contributing to GNOME or another free software project increases the chances that you’ll be hired to work on your favorite project full-time. As a writer, there’s less opportunity to get hired to work on FOSS documentation full time, and pretty much no personal benefit to spending the time to produce quality documentation. If you’ve written the documentation for something, you usually don’t need to refer to it later. (This is not entirely true, I have used my own articles a couple of times when I’ve forgotten specific options for programs and so forth — but I can just as easily scribble a few notes in my handy Moleskine and refer to them later without needing to do full-blown documentation.) Finally, most of the time, FOSS documentation projects are poorly organized. It’s hard to be a casual contributor to a project — you really have to be involved on a pretty deep level to contribute effectively, and I think that’s a turn-off for a lot of writers. I suspect the tools involved are also a bit of a turn-off since a lot of writers are not familiar with, nor do they wish to learn, version control or DocBook. I’m not trying to suggest that writing is rocket science, but it is more difficult than most people seem to believe. Even those who have the ability to write well rarely have the personality type required to write prolifically. This is why I was able to make a good living as a freelancer for so many years. When you take the number of people who understand Linux and FOSS well enough to write about it, then take the number of people who understand it and can write well, and then take the number of people who understand FOSS and write well and who can maintain motivation to write a lot, you’re left with an awfully small number of people.