About when talent matters

It's not always important if you're good at something, until it is

Benji, an old friend of ours, put me straight: “no, it’s not easy. You’re just good at it.”

He was exasperated, and I was taken aback. Usually, particularly when you’re a woman, if you play down what you’re good at people don’t bother to disagree with you. I’d become accustomed to marvelling at being paid for doing something I believed anyone with robust learning skills could do—given a bit of practice and and a bucket of common sense. Benji, though, was talking about something more. Talent.

My thoughts about where talent differs from skill lie in the same smudgy chalk dust as artistry vs craftsmanship. There, I mused that the dividing line involved some measure of vision. Here, I think it’s perhaps an instinctive sympathy; a natural, possibly nurtured head start in getting it. But while I don’t think that you can necessarily turn a craftsman into an artist through practice—I think there has to be something you want to say, and an interesting way to say it—I do think you can make someone so skillful that talent becomes relatively unimportant. Until it isn’t.

Hopefully I’m good enough at this words thing that you followed that.

I believe you can teach the rudiments of good everyday writing: business writing, letter writing, essay writing. There are a few fairly formulaic things you can do that will make any piece of writing better. Kinder on your reader. Something they’re more likely to read (some of) than not. I’ll share a few below, though I’m sure you’ve heard them before. None of them involve any concern for grammar.

It’s just as well, because it’s literally part of my day job to teach people to write clearly. And sometimes I get to work with those people over several months and watch in real time as their writing gets better. And on a few lucky occasions I’ve even had them challenge, edit, and improve my writing, and that really feels like a job exceptionally well done on all sides.

Do they now have talent? Did training and practice unlock a talent? I think I did have talent, because I did not train to do my job. I kept writing in various roles that were mostly technically not writing roles, and making the right kinds of language choices for reasons I didn’t really understand and have had to retrospectively learn. The child of an expert polyglot and an over-explainer, I harnessed my then-undiagnosed ADHD into a knack for making things pithy. And I assumed that if anyone thought about it for long enough, they could do the same.

But I’ve now worked with enough people who are brilliantly thoughtful and incisive and capable to know that’s not true. Some of them will outstrip my intelligence by miles but never be able to write in a way that’s clear or engaging to read. Even if they know the tips. Even if they practise the tricks. Even if they hunch, tongue-out, face screwed up in concentration over the keyboard and tap, tap, tap until their fingernails crack. They’re missing the knack. And they’re probably the ones who’ll be pushing for AI to do more and more writing for us.

These days, I work a lot with AI prompts, too (not here; Cat, I Farted can’t yet decide for me where my stream of consciousness is going to go, thank God). And it’s become even more important to understand why some writing works and some doesn’t. To get good results and then edit them into greatness. Or at least I hope so, if I still want any fun left in my job in five, or even two, years’ time.

The point is: AI can be (and has been) trained on the tips I’ll share to make everything broadly more readable. What comes out though, has a tendency to sound rather bland and generic. It can only recycle and reorder what already exists, based on parameters you’ve already decided for it. And there it is: the moment when talent takes the stage. When you have to take a leap one step beyond what anyone with the right tools can do to something only some people can do.

It’s a bit like when you look an Olympic gymnast and go “hell yeah, they worked their spandex-clad asses off for that, but also if they weren’t specifically built a certain way it would not be possible to be this good”. Anyone who is physically capable of exercise can get a bit fitter, a bit bendier; but they will always hit the limits of their body composition. Talent is that extra bit of flexibility—of flair—that simply comes with the way your brain works. And that’s gold.

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Some tips on structure

You might have been expecting some stuff on writing like you speak, or not using the passive voice. Good advice, but AI, Word’s Editor, and things like the Hemingway app will check that shit for you. Here’s the stuff that’s all about thinking like a reader, rather than a writer, and which it’s harder to prise out of digital assistants.

Try these in your next piece (I hope not sporadically).

Start with your conclusion

It’s the only bit people care about, and they’ll skip the rest to get to it. This is especially true if you’re giving bad news. Working it up to it is balm for you, not them; in fact, there’s a good chance they’ll be pissed off at you beating around the bush.

And on that point…

If it needs to be in bold, underlined, and bright red, it’s too late

Don’t put something you want people to do three paragraphs down and then have to dress it up so they don’t miss it. That’s where you should have started. Also: they don’t need and won’t read any of the context you’ve lovingly included anyway.

Use meaningful subheadings

If you make your subheads into complete thoughts, people skim read down the page and get the gist. If they’re interested enough, they’ll go back for the details. But they’ll have read something—the most important bits, at that—instead of nothing.

And yes, you can do this in emails too.

Regular skimmers will note I don’t actually use subheads a great deal here because I treat this more like a diary entry; it’s largely laziness on my part. Unless I really want to make a point, like in my posts about ADHD or therapy. Or in this bit, where I want you to read and remember the tips, regardless of whether you bother with my explanations for them.

Embrace short bullet points

If you let each bullet point become a paragraph, they cease to be useful. One line per point; no more than five points total.