Encouraging the study of writing for aspiring Computer Science students

I was on a game developer's Discord channel the other day, and a guest posted an off-topic but important question: as a graduating high school student looking to get into a Computer Science degree program, what should I plan to study? I think the author had "hot topics" in mind, and the short discussion covered a few of these. I replied that they should plan to study writing:

Writing. It's not hot or new, but it is a killer skill and underappreciated in CS education and maybe higher education generally. Learn to formulate your thoughts clearly and articulate them well, and many doors open up to you.

This raised some eyebrows, particularly given the popularity of ChatGPT. I had a few minutes on Sunday morning to start fleshing out a reply to the curious and the skeptics.

When anyone can generate text, all the more reason to learn how to write (compose). It's hard not to fall into traps of semantics, so I will quickly explain.

Writing is fundamentally long-form thinking. You are limited in your memory of what you can process, so writing increases the quantity of what you can consider. This has nothing to do with text generation. Indeed, generated text has the illusion of thinking only because it was trained on content that required thinking. (Including the content of me and countless writers whose work is copyrighted and was taken without our permission, but I digress.) 

Let's look at the essay as an exemplar. "Essay" is one of those words that has been destroyed by many modern school systems, but it comes from a root word that means "an attempt." That is, an essay is an attempt to understand something. Given that, look again at one of the classic forms of essays: form a hypothesis, come up with a handful of ways to support it, consider the strongest arguments against it, conclude for or against it. Turn each of those into a paragraph. Don't forget counterarguments--that might be the best part. The outcome of this is not just transmission of something in your head. The outcome of this is that you are now smarter, and so can the reader become. 

Personally, I recommend the old editions of Strunk's Elements of Style as a starting place--the old, public domain ones. They are fun to read. The advice is timeless, and the specific examples of what people got wrong in written English 100 years ago are really funny: some are things we've never heard of today, and some are mistakes people still make. 

On the philosophical side, I recommend Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," which includes some of the best writing advice I've ever found.

This was when I realized I was running into the character limit and running out of time, so I stopped there. I am copying the text here not because it's an unassailable defense of the liberal arts but because I hope it helps someone, and maybe I can find it again later if I need it.

Addendum: The person who posted the original question thanked me for the reply, stating that they were curious about my own writing. That's when I showed my hand and admitted that I am, in fact, a Computer Science Professor.