Writing is hard, often painful, work. After a long research slog, First you have to do research, sometimes taking hours to track down or check a fact. Most of what you gather, you cannot use. If you are not spending hours on the cramped and dark stacks of the library, you sit zombie-like in front of a glowing screen. Only on rare occasions do you get to conduct first-hand research, with travel, interviews, and observation.
Then comes the painful process of actually writing, putting down one word after another. And then, once you have a draft, the really hard work begins—rewriting, revising, getting critiques from others. And as soon as you turn an essay in, you realize all the mistakes and omissions you made.
As the legendary sportswriter Red Smith once said: “Writing is easy. You just open a vein and bleed.”
Well, that is one way of looking it. But while writing requires a lot of hard work, it is also one of the most exciting of all pursuits. Writing offers an opportunity to wrestle with important topics, express your most passionate thoughts, and even nourish your ego. Writing is a process of discovery. Even when you think you know what you want to write, you always discover something new.
Here are some simple rules to follow to become a better writer. Master them all, and there’s no basic writing you cannot do.
1. Relax.
Anxiety paralyzes the brain. Writing, playing with ideas and seeing what works, should be fun and creative. When you get stuck, don’t dig a deeper ditch. Try something else. Brainstorm (See No. 2).
Imagine real-life situations, involving specific people, scenes, and action (see No. 3). Think about dilemmas people might want to solve. Or pick a passage from a reading and try to see how it fits into the larger scheme of things. If it helps, imagine exaggerated, even comical or nonsensical, situations.
2. Brainstorm.
Especially at the beginning of the writing process, but also throughout the process, you need to explore every possible idea and piece of evidence possible. Think of every situation and concept that could have a bearing on your subject. Do not sort ideas until you have allowed them first to flow unobstructed.
Try to brainstorm ideas onto one sheet of paper. If you need a big sheet of paper, that’s fine. But you need to see everything in one place. Once you have brainstormed, you need to separate concepts from illustrations or facts. Then you need to consider what the most important or surprising ideas or relationships might be. Ask yourself the kind of questions that would interest you if you were a reader or audience.
3. Visualize.
Try to visualize real-world situations, and then understand the cause/effect relationship arising from that situation.
Close your eyes and imagine a scene from a movie. Visualize characters struggling over something important. Think about the tensions between the characters—and also those within each character.
In order to get to important concepts, we need to imagine the real-world implications of those concepts. The battles over issues like abortion, divorce, torture, immigration, medical care, labor relations, and countless other issues matter not because of some abstract ideas. They matter because they affect real people. To understand abstract ideals, you need to understand the human conflicts behind them.
Once we can visualize real-world situations, we can begin to see patterns that explain human behavior.
4. Keep things simple.
The best way to present complex ideas is to break them down, simply. Always look for a simpler argument and a simpler way of expressing that argument.
Look for the simple subject-verb-object statement in every sentence. Whenever possible, express things in the simple S-V-O form: “Derek Jeter booted the ground ball” or “President Bush criticized antiwar activists.” Of course, you will need more complex constructions too. But always make sure you know who’s doing what.
Consider the basic elements of a sentence here:
SUBJECT (Noun, pronoun, sometimes modified by adjectives) –> VERB (sometimes with an adverb) –> OBJECT (noun, pronoun, sometimes modified)
“Derek Jeter booted the ball.” “She lost her keys.” “The President blamed Congress.” “The chef fired the cook and dish washer.” “The rowdy fans three paper cups at the controversial outfielder.”
Or think of is this way:
SUBJECT (a noun, however simple or complex–what the sentence is all about) –> PREDICATE (tells something about the subject, usually starting with a verb)
“The book gave me a lot to think about.” “The president has a lot of unfinished business.”
And then add those pieces that give writing greater depth and clarity:
Helping words — prepositions (at, to, under, below, above, behind, before, etc.), articles (the, and, a/an, these, that), conjunctions (and, or, but).
Word clusters — Verbal phrases (prepositional [”The statue on the table“], verbal [”To eat is essential”], gerundal [”Swimming is fun”], participial [”Exhausted from a day of swimming, Leila watched a movie”], infinitive [”To make a good first impression creates new opportunities”]) and clauses (independent [”Isabel ate lunch in the cafeteria before classes”], dependent [”When Isabel ate lunch in the cafeteria before classes, …”])
That’s pretty much everything you will ever find in a good sentence. Keep it simple, and you will never lose your way.
5. Be a constant gardener.
Look for ways to express your ideas more simply. Look for common errors of grammar and spelling. Harry Shaw once wrote: “There is no such thing as good writing. There is only good rewriting.” To present ideas clearly, we need to clear out the clutter—needless words, repetitive sentences, clichéd statements, unrevealing quotations. We need to make sure the writing’s architecture reveals itself as clearly as the foundation and shell at a construction site. And we need to make sure to use simplest sentence structure—usually the S-V-O structure.
Here are the most common problems of grammar and style:
• Wordiness, repetition, overstatements, and statements of the obvious
• Sentence fragments and run-on sentences
• Problems with proper names and second-reference pronouns
• Double negatives
• Hanging participles
• Wordy introductory fluff (“It is interesting to note…,” “From the dawn of time…”).
• Tense and voice confusions
• Subject-verb agreements
• Commas, colons, and semicolonsHere are the most common problems of word usage:
• Affect and effect
• It’s and its
• It/its and they/their
• There and there and they’re
• That, which, and who
• Lie and lay
• To, too, and two
• Like and as
• Who and whom, whose and who’s
• Medium and media
• Less and fewer
One trick for cutting clutter is to read drafts backward. Read the last section first, then the next-to-last section, all the way to the opening section. Backward editing offers two benefits. First, it helps you avoid getting swept away by your own prose. Second, it helps you to envision the structure of your writing.
Also, search for instances of “to be” and “to have.” Those constructions usually obscure rather than clarify matters.
6. Do not get argumentative.
You want to make your argument so compelling that even skeptics are eager to embrace and further your argument. If you are doing your job, people with other perspectives will see the merits of your case. You do not need to put down others’ arguments to make your own.
Eagerly anticipate and present opposing arguments, not just to counter them, but also to engage as broad a readership as possible.
No matter how right you are, someone somewhere holds a different perspective with some validity. If you appreciate a different perspective, you will sharpen your own thinking.
7. Discuss issues with other people and read aloud.
To be a good writer, you also need to be a good speaker. Speaking is just writing on air, at least in some ways. The better you speak, the better you can write.
Writing is often understood as a solitary business. And, to be sure, we need to get away from the noise of everyday life to think through difficult problems and apply ourselves to writing. But you cannot flip the “social” switch all the time. You need to connect writing with other people. Writing is, after all, communication.
In our modern age, we have radically separated important and related ways of thinking—writing and speaking, words and images, right and left sides of the brain, thinking and action. But if we want to do anything well, we need to work on all these skills.
Speaking about issues gives you greater mental flexibility and confidence. Anyone can speak well, which gives you greater confidence. Speaking forces you to give your thoughts some kind of order. Speaking extemporaneously also taps into the deep reservoirs of knowledge that usually gets stuck below the surface of your consciousness.
Reading drafts of writing aloud helps you imagine how readers will take in your words. Will they stumble? Will they get confused? Will they get lost? Will they understand your point? Will they visualize your ideas?
For more posts on writing, visit the Elements of Writing Blog. Check out the posts on Storytelling, Writing Mechanics, Analysis, and Writers on Writing.