81–89 of 89 posts
Read your writing out loud to yourself, carefully observing the punctuation. You won't become Hemingway, but you will find the most obvious flaws in your writing.
I like to paste things into this as well... http://www.hemingwayapp.com/
Are there good classes one can take online which teach someone how to get through writing anxiety? Or how to write despite the fact that you cannot really ever know how your audience will interpret what you are saying?
IMO, it's not writing that you're necessarily struggling with, but editing afterwards. Good writing is a process that includes time to think about that writing. The answer is to write a lot. After you go through a certain volume of text, you get a better feel for it. Andy Weir wrote "the Martian" and he was an amateur; he set daily writing goals (word counts) and stuck to them. Reducing amount of written text is not…
In college I helped a lot of people write papers, and almost always they were trying to "sound academic", and the sentences were so complex they didn't even parse. So I'd ask, "What does this mean?", and whatever they said, I'd reply, "Write that down!" Basically they were trying too hard. It reminds me of the common advice to edit your work by reading it out loud. If you are a great writer your prose might be better…
To be fair, I think schools encourage this sort of behavior. I've had countless "$x number of words/pages, minimum" writing assignments. Eventually, you start to be convinced that every teacher wants it that way.
I quickly learned to be concise.
TL;DR Get to the point in the first paragraph or I'll make you take an online newspaper writing course.
Wow all the comments here seem negative. The guy is just saying that people should be clearer with their writing and getting to the point right away to avoid confusion. If they're writing about a topic that's more complex, sure, the writing will need to be more complex. But there's nothing wrong with communicating simply if the subject allows it.
But if its an article meant for the general public, it's your job as a writer to make it more palatable.
A good book related to the topic of clear writing is "The Pyramid Principle". http://www.amazon.com/The-Pyramid-Principle-Writing-Thinking... This book was recommended by a fellow HN'er a few years back in a different thread. I bought a copy and read it and was suitably impressed. I'm still working on integrating the ideas from the book, but I think it's worth reading. Basically, the book teaches you to organize your…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, I think schools encourage this sort of behavior. I've had countless "$x number of words/pages, minimum" writing assignments. Eventually, you start to be convinced that every teacher wants it that way.
> I've had countless "$x number of words/pages, minimum" writing assignments. My better professors had, rather than just minimums, either ranges or maximums.