I learned to write properly while doing my Ph. D. Basically, if your main job is publishing articles, that is not optional of course. And since English is the d

I learned to write properly while doing my Ph. D. Basically, if your main job is publishing articles, that is not optional of course. And since English is the dominant language to publish in, I had to learn English as well (my native language is Dutch). An eye opening insight I had while I was learning to write properly was that I was doing a lot of things systematically wrong. So, the job became learning to do it right in a systematic way. This didn't happen overnight but I learned from my mistakes one by one and started criticizing my own writings based on that and slowly improved what I was doing. One by one, I was eliminating whole categories of mistakes and learning why they were mistakes. Another thing that I learned was that putting a lot of effort in writing creates a sunk cost fallacy. You start becoming defensive of all the text you have write. Learning to rewrite your text and stepping over your reluctance to delete stuff you have written is a key skill. Iterating makes things better. It's literally faster to rewrite than to correct text. If it looks or feels wrong, just delete it and write it again. Another insight is that writing things down forces you to make your fuzzy ideas concrete. You get progressive insight from rewriting things that you've already written. This works better if you wait a bit for your short term memory to purge itself of any notions you might have. You can use time to your advantage here. Simply take a break and rewrite or revise what you have written later. Weekends and sleeping are great for this. You come back fresh and you instantly spot all the mistakes you made earlier. People think of writing as an art form. Which of course it is. But in many ways, writing is like programming. It is governed by simple rules (grammar and stylistic ones). All you need to do is learn those rules and apply them. There's a certain logic to how a good text flows. How sentences and paragraphs connect, etc. The whole job of learning to write is figuring out how that works. Tools actually exist that can check your writing automatically these days. Use those and don't argue with them and instead fix the issues that these tools will point out to you and learn about why those are issues that need fixing. Once you stop producing text that has loads of such issues, you'll have become a better writer. It's not that hard. But you do need to make an effort. And of course know to use and install such tools. And since programmers indeed depend on written communication, this is a good skill to have.