Prose is important; even if you’re writing for no one else, you’re writing for yourself in the future. The best developers I know write a lot of prose, both documentation and commit messages and comments. The value is not immediately visible, it won’t make your tests pass, but it actually is part of keeping technical debt low; some tech debt comes from not knowing in detail what a piece of code does. Good docs and comments and commit messages let you know at least what it’s supposed to do.
So, prose is a part of the craft of software development, but not just any prose: particularly technical prose, explanatory, lucid prose. And it’s not something we, as developers, are usually taught.
We’re, generally speaking, a group that’s pretty good at self-education, though. We pick up new languages, frameworks, protocols, and principles. So not only must we do this, but we can do this. It’s hard, because it’s big and fuzzy (there are no tests that can tell you if your prose is correct), but still, we can do it.
This post is just an exhortation, not a guide, though. The subject is too large to cover with a simple trick or a general principle. So, how do you begin to write better? First, write more and read more. Second, get your stuff edited.