Five Paragraph Essays

There's also the anecdotal/analogical style, the narrative style — of course you can use any voice you wish to sew multiple styles together.

You should use your topic as a basis for experimenting with different styles, not as a means to prove your mastery of the language.

Papers are not proofs.

What you need to understand is that much of writing in school is bullshit. And not actually very useful for building up your writing skills.

For me I'd say the most important influences towards improving my writing came from one particular course in high school (modern european history) where the homework was all short essays and paragraph-ish long answers to a bunch of questions/topics and heavy participation in usenet during my college years.

With papers it's too easy to fall into a pattern of satisficing, because the bar is set pretty low, even in college, and the exercises are mostly unrealistic. But when you have to spend time trying to communicate complicated subjects to real human beings or to make detailed arguments then you have to step up your skills substantially.

Because it tries to prescribe a rule-of-thumb as a rule.

I have the same problem as the person you're responding to, and writing is not a form of thinking (for me, at least) - generating anything to put onto the page feels like an insurmountable task. I like the GP's suggestion of making a speech, I'm likewise much better at vocalizing than writing.

I'm pretty sure there is some underlying difference and it would be good to know what it is - I was diagnosed with dyslexia when I was 14, which never really felt like a satisfying answer, though I do have some dyslexic-ish symptoms (I tend to spell phonetically when I'm very tired and often type word-correct anagrams - like "never really left like a satisfying answer", above).

A nice post whose essential point is that you should eschew formulaic methods of writing that force you to fit your thoughts into a rigid format and thus hamper your ability to express them in a way that best suits the subject.

Writing style most definitely ought to be customized for its subject and context.

Some say to write simply. This can be good. You engage your reader. You use active voice. You limit adverbs. You keep sentences short. Nothing wrong at all with this. It works well for many purposes.

Personally, I like to vary the short, direct, and active approach with occasional long, flowing sentences that can add flow to your writing, that can mix polysyllabic words with plain ones, that can use the passive voice as freely as the active when it is appropriate for the task at hand, that can build a succession of thoughts one upon the other in ways that flow naturally for a reader, that can interpose an arresting pause or two to emphasize a particular point - for example, by using hyphens to isolate an illustrative example - and that can bring in parallel elements to help dramatize a point, whether as a matter of form, or of substance, or of any combination of the two.

Whatever your style, the structure of your piece ought to be customized to its content. If it is a simple subject, it can have a simple format (nothing inherently wrong with the 5-paragraph format if it is not used in a formulaic way). If it is complex, then it needs to develop its themes with whatever level of nuance and subtlety may be needed to say something intelligent about the subject.

You need to be yourself in how you express your thoughts. Ever read a standard old-fashioned press release. It almost always begins something like this: "Company X, the world's leading producer of xxx and other market-leading products . . ." Apparently, whoever writes these things has been taught to puff the company right up front to give the release maximum impact. For me, this sort of style has the opposite effect. I read the canned language and I immediately click off and think, "this piece is going to be of very limited value to me, if any." And, just as this is true of such press releases, it is true of any other artificial way that people express themselves in writing. The artificiality may give you a fill-in-the-blanks way of completing your writing task but it works against you with the reader. Readers want to be stimulated in their thinking and, by using custom forms of expression - whether it be by an apt metaphor, a vivid illustration, an engaging story, or whatever - you do them a tremendous service by making what you say interesting. For this purpose, you should put yourself in their shoes and think, "how would I want to have this explained to me to make it interesting."

But being yourself is more than just ranting about a subject. Good writing takes hard work and by that I mean far more than putting time into a particular piece. I mean instead that good writing is the result of a cumulative effort, often spread over a lifetime, by which you read widely about many things, learn how to think, write frequently to develop your skills, gain depth of language skills through significant formal study if you can, and do any of a number of other things that prepare you to meet your reader as a craftsman and not as a hack (used in its non-HN meaning, of course). Yes, this is very hard work. But you will see that it is well worth the effort. You have a lot to say about interesting things. Well, learn to say it well.

Other opinions may vary. This is mine. In general, it also seems to be that of the author of this piece, who put his thoughts well. It is a post worth reading. For anyone interested, I have put together a few additional thoughts on what makes for good legal writing (my particular vocation), which is set forth here: http://www.grellas.com/articles.html.