Recently, someone asked me to give writing tips, and I didn’t have any ready. I was caught unprepared. Never again. I have a standard spiel on how to run experiments, how to price things, and a few takes on how to affect the business and not just toil away calculating standard errors in obscurity.
Alas, I don’t have such a rant on writing yet. So, consider this post a winding, inefficient way to develop a spiel.
First, you must have something to say. This is the main rule. If you have something important enough to say, you can use the passive voice, imprecise verbs, and incomprehensible constructions. No one will care. You don’t need to revise Genius.
Sadly, most of us do not write about Genius, Earth-Shattering Ideas (GESIs). We write about power analyses and the distribution of revenue across the segment-everyone-thinks-is-important-this-week. So, unfortunately, we have to write well.
Selection explains why most scientists and academics write poorly. There’s no filter to remove bad writing from fields where solving the problem is enough. The cost of bad writing is too low.
The opposite happens in fields where writing quality matters too much. The same selection mechanism causes most literary fiction to be about silly, sophomoric ideas because the content matters so little. You get very well-written 250-page books about the sex lives of college professors in New England.
The trick to having something to say is to know something. If you know something, you can talk about it fluently and freely. Knowing something is hard and requires many years of work. There’s no shortcut. No tips or tricks. You can learn to write better at a technical level in a few weeks. Learning statistics? Economics? How to paint water lilies? No chance.
My best practical tip is to delete anything that sounds even slightly awkward. You’re reading the sentence in the most favorable light it’ll ever be read. You know what you’re trying to say. If it sounds weird to you, it’s unintelligible to everyone else. Even if the line is cute, clever, funny, delightful in bed, you have to let her go.
Be charming whenever you can. Everyone plays a bit of a character when they write or at work. So, you might as well pick a charming one. Being mean gets you clicks, I guess, but clicks only monetize through advertising. Being nice gets you jobs. Jobs pay more than advertising for 99% of folks. You especially don’t want to pretend to be a mean, smarter-than-thou type if you aren’t really like that. The people who play that character successfully online are like that in real life, too. The hate flows through them. If it doesn’t flow through you, then you’ll sound fake-mean, which is the worst kind.
Be precise. English is a great language, but she tempts you to be vague. I don’t know if there’s a word for this feature of the language—maybe a linguist will teach me something new—but you can say anything in English by combining common, universal words. You can describe any form of movement with adverbs. She moved quickly. She moved silently. She moved decisively. When an entire essay, document, or e-mail uses these constructions, it sounds dry, bland, weak, and corporate. She sprinted. She crept. She strode.
Pick a writer you like and read anything by them. Re-read something you wrote. Professionals never modify generic verbs and nouns, and we mere mortals slip into vague, lifeless words easily.
A good rule is that if you find yourself describing a phenomenon in four words or more, there’s a specific word you could replace it with.
Your mileage may vary, but I swear by this rule: your first draft has too many transitions. The only transition you need between 95.8% of thoughts is a period. I don’t know why it helps, and I don’t see this advice in most “how to write” essays, but it works. Most transitions are formulaic, and readers skip them anyway.
Rewrite word-by-word a few times. It takes a few cycles to kill the vague expressions. Real-time conversation is so vague and imprecise that it takes a while to spot it in your writing.
Repetition is fine. Use the same words for the same ideas. Don’t break out the thesaurus. It’s confusing to call the same place a road, a street, and a boulevard.
Care, and don’t be ashamed of caring.
Thanks for reading!
Zach
Connect at: https://linkedin.com/in/zlflynn