11–20 of 95 posts
Working with an editor is huge. I worked with several editors and reviewers both when submitting to other blogs and when writing my books. I learned a lot.
There are great writer assistance tools such as Write Good, etc. They helped with avoiding weasel phrasing, etc.
Sentences should have a quality that makes them individually memorable.
There's a video where Alan Moore recommends reading terrible books. Knowing what frustrates me in years of poorly presented university textbooks helps me in a way.
Quite the exercise it is.
- grammarly (mostly excellent, I ignore some suggestions)
- reading books more with stylistic elements that push the boundaries of what you're used to. I write technical blogs, but I've found some inspiration reading very different writing. Some examples are Thomas Pynchon, James Joyce, Greg Egan
- setting up constraints. Can you explain this in less sentences without making a long run-on sentence? How concise can you make this whole post? On the flipside, can you avoid all the most common adjectives when describing something? If you take a tokenized word count on your work, what words do you rely on? Can you delete them?
It can be people you know, but there are also online writing communities that will give candid feedback in a safe environment. Usually the catch is you’ll have to return the favor for someone else in the community, but that’s not a bad thing.
2. Practice converting your thoughts to the written word so that they're clearly understood by anyone. That is the exercise at hand and it takes practice.
3. Once you've mastered clearly communicating your ideas, add some cleverness to your writing. Use double-entendre and practice economy of words. Leave something for the reader to guess, allowing one's imagination to fill the gaps with what you didn't say.
4. Finally, practice the art of showing versus telling, i.e., the art of story-telling versus an analytical accounting of facts.