cultures of writing

It's hard not to notice the pivotal role that strong writing cultures play in enabling innovation

I've observed that innovative organizations, from early-stage startups to places like the New York Times, Dropbox, and now Anthropic develop unique writing cultures that profoundly influence how ideas take shape. My hypothesis is that the quality of an organization's output depends on the degree to which it nurtures writing's imaginative essence. If innovation thrives on imagination then organizations must cultivate an environment where writing is treated as an act to give ideas the space to grow and resonate. This type of writing enhances an organization's capacity to adapt and change. 

The Flower Festival at St Tropez by Moise Kisling, 1917

• They see writing not merely as a bureaucratic necessity, but as a creative act with the power to accelerate change through persuasion. To fully harness writing's multiplier effect on their potential, they carve out space for empowering expression that goes beyond mandated reports. This is achieved through sophisticated tooling infrastructure and rigorous iterative processes that enable crisp, compelling communication.

• In stellar cultures, writing becomes a mindset for engaging with the world. Ideas evolve from fuzzy to concrete and actionable through writing. For them, writing is not just transactional, but a craft and even an art form to explore ideas and express oneself. It becomes an exercise in freedom that reveals new realms of thought. These cultures empower people to imagine freely, transcending the limits of their present selves, enabling them to build the future.                                            

Writing as a high end product. 

At the New York Times the organizational culture revolves around enabling great writing. When text itself is the end product, everything else serves to enable the highest quality written journalism. They invest insanely amount of resources to support writers in honing their craft. From extensive editing and meticulous fact-checking to pristine page layouts and typography, every detail is crafted to elevate the words. 

I learned a culture so devoted to quality writing begets Pulitzer-winning journalism that builds a loyal readership. I spent ~2 years working on custom features for the main text editor Oak, building infrastructure for multimedia, developing storytelling capabilities, among others. The goal was always to remove engineering friction so editors could focus fully on their creative process. When the users you build for are journalists, your world inevitably starts revolving around facilitating stellar storytelling. In fact, this led to a culture of building nearly everything in-house in order to have full control over user experience and infrastructure patterns. By owning the entire stack, they could shape opinionated writing tools for journalists themselves.

A culture that honors writing like that also gives people room to find their voice. It recognizes that early efforts may be ragged, and offers the patience to let skills develop. Writers need freedom to follow curiosity, to play with language and form. That’s how journalists become who they want to become, and the organization becomes a place where excellence thrives.  

Writing as a committed way for showing love to users. 

At Dropbox I learned how much delight can be brought by micro-experiences. They had an excellent UX writing team and design research group that were critical to crafting delightful experiences through thoughtful writing. The writers used to understand users deeply and determine how to best speak to them throughout the product experience. And it wasn't just these dedicated roles - they built a culture where everyone from customer support to engineers understood the impact of writing, and aligned around bringing empathy to users through words. 

The team I was on relied heavily on research and writing expertise to build the right narratives into our new product. As we were designing new experiences we were really thoughtful in communicating choices we made, even with volume management. The infrastructure to support high-quality, human-centered writing made a difference in their ability to build new products that scaled human voice. 

Writing as an evolving understanding of alien artifacts. 

At Anthropic writing promotes discipline of thought. The work of translating nebulous ideas into concrete words forces intellectual discipline and rigor, especially in research context. A few examples: 

• Prompting models becomes a form of writing that every research engineer engages in daily. This kind of writing requires forming hypotheses, testing assumptions, and revising based on new insights.

• I personally started writing an extensive doc on my daily research progress and thoughts we have during the meetings to capture the evolution of our approach to hard problems. I also log all the bugs I encounter and how they were resolved as a way to get better at programming. This way I learn where analogies break down, and where new metaphors are needed. I discover gaps in my own knowledge and often this regular practice of refining fuzzy thinking into precise expression sharpens my mental model on how RL works and hones conceptual clarity around large language models. This also helps me to from talking about ambitions to methodically scoping executable tasks. 

• Another thing I love at Anthropic is that we each have our own Slack channels to share works in progress and thoughts. People can subscribe to these channels. I feel very grounded to have a place where I can share not fully formed thoughts or questions. By committing ideas to writing, we also open them to critique. Through the rigor of writing, we improve not just the ideas themselves, but also how we think. And it is through this pursuit of clarity that we capture our current understanding of technology and how we want to make progress. 

Some view writing as perfunctory. Others see it as an art form, cultivating a high bar to excellence. Many fall somewhere in between. Regardless of where they land on the spectrum, every organization develops its own unique writing culture that influences how writing is valued and how subtle, unspoken norms of an institution shape the voice and style of written communication through products and research. Over time, I noticed that excellent teams consistently had a strong culture of writing and almost always internally recognize its imaginative essence.

And what I've learned is that excellent cultures of writing humanize organizations. Writing gives voice for teams to express ideas, users to feel heard, products to sustain, and research to progress. Masterful writing touches people deeply because it speaks to who we are - our identity, values, fears, dreams, and our approach to science. And so I find myself in awe of organizations that dedicate themselves to the written word. That give people permission to write fearlessly as a means of engaging with the world.  When done right, writing shapes the internal culture that scales and innovates. 

---

Curiousities

The Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System by Bill Gates, 1999

The Hundred-Year Language by Paul Graham, 2003

How Stripe Built a Writing Culture by RC Victorino, 2020

My AI Writing Robot by Kyle Chayka from the New Yorker, 2023

Tools for a Culture of Writing by Matt Blewitt, 2021

Laboratory Life by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, 1985 — "If sociology could not be applied in a thorough going way to scientific knowledge, it would mean that science could not scientifically know itself."

Writing In Public, Inside Your Company by The Kool Aid Factory, 2021