Writers Are Specialists, Not Generalists

Writers are specialists, not generalists.

All of us.

I don’t mean what our work is about; that varies widely along this spectrum. But in terms of what we work on, writing is a specialized, technical skill that requires extensive training and — if I may be brutally honest — has objective, measurable standards of output quality.

I care about this for two reasons:

One is that organizations undervalue (and underinvest in) writing by treating it as a general skill. This is not to say that general skills are less valuable — on the contrary. The problem is that the highly valued generalists given a mandate to hire writers should be hiring technical peers with whom they can collaborate, but instead they hire generalist subordinates whose output they believe they can manage to a high-enough degree of quality.

Look around you to see how well that works.

The other reason this matters to me is more fundamental, though. It gives rise to this situation. It’s that, by and large, professional writers also believe this!

In part, this can be attributed right back to reason 1. Writers are precarious. Writing jobs seem too good to be true — because they almost always are — so we feel like we have to be flexible, adaptable — ready to be good at everything and become anything — so we can talk our way into whatever job comes along next.

This, of course, perpetuates the cycle of the devaluation of writing. We under-sell ourselves.

But wanting to be a generalist is also understandable. Generalists are awesome! They’re leaders. And as people who often think of ourselves as idea-workers, writers are always looking for that big break where our ideas save the day and catapult us into the ranks of leadership.

But writing does not consist of having ideas. That’s the whole point. One’s tendency to have ideas often inhibits one’s skills as a writer. Skillful writing — especially the kind you get paid for — requires embodying the minds of others and understanding how words translate into their ideas. Writing is its own skill. Certainly, it requires a foundation of strong thinking skills. That is the nature of technical skills.

Writing is an action upon the world. It is engineering. It requires a firm grasp of the tolerances of its material (human minds). It requires a pilot’s confidence in the laws of cause and effect. It requires superior orientation in space and time, and the ability to map a course through it, so others can follow to their destination without getting lost. It requires precision. And it requires comprehensive expertise in its domain, which is not concepts but rather the periodic table of words.

Concepts are the domain of all human business. We all need to understand them, and we all need to increase our understanding constantly. Often, that need is urgent. We need the help of experts who can break concepts down into their constituent elements and reconstitute them in a way we can understand. That is a writer’s job.