On Becoming a Better Writer
I've met many people who claim they’re not very good at writing and feel it’s not worth the effort to improve. My own experience, back when I was in IT, was that writing could be a powerful credential for advancement. The proposals, recommendations, and reports I wrote gave me visibility all over the company and contributed to my superiors viewing me as a contender for promotion.
Of course, it didn't hurt my case that many of the other managers were atrocious writers. Run-on sentences were among their worst gaffes, with one, two, sometimes even three sentences back to back, with at best a comma between them.
For me, run-on sentences are jarring evidence of a lack of basic writing skills. Having read Mary Norris's delightful and amusing book Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, I now know there are many more ways to go “punctuationally” astray than I had realized. Still, it's not as if these managers were illiterate; most were articulate in expressing their views in spoken form. But the more they put in writing, the better my writing looked.
If you want to get better at writing, you have to write and then write some more. Writing well is a skill, and improvement takes practice. In the process, you have to learn to trust yourself. Often, I sit down at the keyboard with a blank screen and a blank mind. Yet somehow, something takes over, and ideas surface that I didn’t know I had.
Of course, it's important not to expect your first draft to be brilliant prose. A mishmash of incoherent thoughts is more like it. Whatever you spew out to start with is just the starting point. It's the rework—revising, editing, more revising—that makes all the difference. Any time you see writing you really like, especially when it’s from your favorite authors, recognize that it started out as a messy first draft.
If you get stuck while you're writing—or even if you don't—take a break and do something else. Your mind keeps working on your writing even when you're not pounding the keys. When you give yourself time away from your writing, you'll bring a fresh perspective to it when you resume. Some of the ideas in this article came to me while it was set aside.
And try not to edit as you write. I once saw a cartoon in which a person wrote The on a whiteboard and then sat back to contemplate how it might be improved. Before you delve into editing, try to complete a chunk of writing, whether that's a paragraph, a page, or an entire article or chapter. Keep in mind the words of Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild: “I write to find out what I have to say. I edit to figure out how to say it.”
If you want to improve your writing, make a commitment to enjoy the process. When you actively decide to approach your writing with a positive mindset, it becomes a lot more fun.
