Knowing how to write is one of the most important skills in the world. It's also one of the most overlooked. Most people learn the basics then are let free to sink or swim. While we barely talk about it, learning to write can change your life.
Writing can get you hired and fired; it can lose you friends and alienate people. With access to billions of people at your fingertips, it's more important than ever that you know how to write.
It's easy to think everyone (or at least most people) know how to write because it's something we all do. Everyone writes emails, tweets, texts, and posts. We write grocery lists, Christmas cards, and applications for a driver's license. Why would you learn how to write when you already know?
Knowing how to write well is what I'm talking about here. The difference between writing and writing well might mean you land the job, ace the class, arrange the date, get the refund. Whatever goal you're trying to achieve, you're more likely to hit it if you can write well.
There are plenty of little things you can do and simple steps you can take to improve your writing. Everything from a basic understanding of grammar to reading to jogging can help you improve your writing, and I'm going to cover them all here.
This post is a bunch of ideas, info, tools, and exercises to help you improve your writing. I've compiled them along my own writing journey. Most of them derive from failures. I've tried writing drunk. I've tried writing 10 hours at a time. I've tried a lot of things that don't work.
These are the best lessons I've picked up. Most, if not all, are unoriginal. I've just compiled them in one place to save you time. Some of them might not work for you; one or two might be perfect. Hopefully, there's something useful for everyone.
These ideas can help you improve an essay, enhance a job application, or improve your emails to colleagues. You'll send better first messages on dating apps, and take care of administrative bullshit more easily like bills, refunds, emails to airlines... Whatever it may be, better writing will help.
With the preponderance of STEM and programming, many people have left their language writing by the wayside. Do you struggle to turn your ideas into sentences without complicating matters, confusing your reader, and making your life that little bit harder? Well then, this post is for you.
What is writing
We've been writing for over five thousand years. Ever since someone in Mesopotamia made markings on clay envelopes to record transactions, humans have used symbols to communicate more and more diverse and complicated meanings.
Writing has evolved from clay tablets and cylinders through quills to pencils, typewriters, keyboards, and touchscreens. Now there's apps than transcribe as you speak.
Essentially, writing is conveying the thoughts in your head to someone else using visual language. It's a lot more than that – record-keeping, art, propaganda, slander, entertainment, but for our purposes, writing articulates your thoughts and ideas using words to communicate with someone else.
Most people in the world over the age of four can write. Only 12% of the world's population was literate in 1820. Nowadays, around 86% of the world's population can read and write. Isn't that awesome?
It's true that most people, especially high school and college grads, can write a complete and grammatically-correct sentence. But writing well can get you ahead of the pack. It's pretty surprising how much of our modern, tech-driven lives are still determined by such an old-school skill as writing.
Want a job? Write a CV. Want a promotion? Write an email to your boss. Want a date? Write a message on Tinder. Want a refund? Write to Amazon. Want money? Write an SEO article. Want to get ahead in life? Learn how to write.
We use writing to get what we want. If you can write well, you have a better chance of getting what you want. It's as simple as that. Any of those aforementioned tasks can be completed using shitty writing. Accomplishing them successfully is another trick entirely.
Bad writing gets ignored. It can also infuriate a mob, get you fired, disgraced, banned, and deplatformed, and not in that order. If you're misunderstood because of your writing, it's your fault. Pleading ignorance, context, or irony won't cut it in today's social clusterfuck. The responsibility's on you, the writer.
It serves us all to improve our writing. Big companies aren't interested in putting out the dumpster fire that is the internet these days. Not to get conspiratorial or anything, but it's on us, the users, to clean up this mess we've made.
Not to get hyperbolic either, but good writing will save the planet. Sure it can get you laid, promoted, employed, or followed. But good writing can also inspire, assuage, persuade, unite, de-escalate, build empathy, and bring peace, love, and harmony to planet Earth.
Why is it important
No one's going to do it for you. Once you're spat out of the school system, it's on you to improve your writing or die. Writing's a skill that we learn when we're kids, then we're let out free to fuck up or flourish. There's plenty of people fending for themselves with high school English or worse.
Just because you passed English exams when you were 18 doesn't mean you can write. The basics don't cut it anymore. We're using writing more than ever; everyone's got access to a billion pairs of eyes; trillions of words get read every single day.
Unlike the Boomers who came before us, we're not getting a 40-year career. We don't just go to university then get a job then retire. Lifelong learning is the new norm. Most people will have a dozen different jobs. It's on you to improve your writing. If you don't, the world will pass you by.
Writing is hard. Lots of people think it's easy because it's something we do every day. But there's a big difference between messaging a friend, applying for a job, crafting an A-grade essay, and making money from SEO-writing.
Things like register, audience, form, structure, coherence, and cohesion need to come into your writing before you hit send/publish/post. I'm not saying you need to plan out each message, weigh the pros and cons, and do a spider diagram for your Facebook posts, but you gotta think before you write.
Intention is key. Figure out what you want the effect of your writing to be. When someone reads your writing, how should they feel, what should they think and do? What are you trying to achieve? If you can answer these questions, your writing will be more effective.
Ever seen a movie that started great, was good all the way through then bombed the ending? Ever felt as disappointed by a shitty ending as GoT or The Dome? Well, that's cause the writers didn't know where they were going.
Different writing styles
Here's a quick rundown of some different writing styles. Knowing the form in which you're participating can help you keep within the agreed-upon boundaries and not sound like an incompetent jackass.
Expository – Informational, not creative. Use it to describe or explain. There's logic to expository writing. Write a plan, including an introduction, body, and conclusion.
Descriptive – Capture an event, person, place or thing using descriptive writing. Pay close attention to details, use figurative language like metaphors, and employ all five senses to evoke a picture in the reader's mind.
Persuasive – Convince the reader to agree with you. Non-fiction persuasive writing can be a speech, letter, ad, article, or post. Using rhetorical techniques like repetition makes your writing more persuasive.
Narrative – Tell a story using characters, setting, and plot that involves internal or external conflict. Narrative writing usually includes descriptive writing and dialogue.
Technical – Write about a particular subject in depth and focus. Technical writing requires direction, instruction, and explanation.
Analytical – High-level academic writing where you review various viewpoints and evidence. Reflect on your thinking process and discuss its implications in your conclusions.
Think of writing like talking. If you're like me, you talk differently when you're with friends or family or colleagues, etc. Match the style to the subject matter and tailor it to the specific audience. Your communications will be much more efficient if you can write in each style.
Writing is different from speaking with a friend
It can be pretty hard to tell what tone of voice someone's using when their speech is converted to black lines on a piece of digital paper. Plenty of people have fucked up trying to be funny online.
Knowing how to write tone can save your ass. Are you trying to be funny? Well, there are ways of showing it. Are you trying to be sarcastic? Tread very carefully, my friend. You can do it, but don't assume everyone reads your writing in the voice you intended.
I'm not saying I know exactly how to stay out of trouble on the internet. It's important you know that writing can sound very different when there's no context of tone, pitch, context, body language, etc.
If someone gets outraged by what you meant as a joke, it's pretty much impossible for you to dig your way out. Yelling 'Context!' gets you nowhere; neither does, 'It was a joke!' Once you've written and published something online, your no longer in control.
While this is the same as writing before the internet, like novels, magazine articles, and newspapers, it's a brave new world out there. A third of the planet has the potential to go viral because of one stupid thing they wrote after a night of margaritas and Ambien.
Learning how to read your own writing is essential for survival in this crazy new jungle. How do you improve at reading your own writing? Read a lot. Read everything you can get your hands on. There's no better way to improve your writing than by reading.
Another good way to get out of jail is by giving yourself some time between writing and publishing. After you write something, leave it for a while (overnight if you can) then come back to it with fresh eyes. If it's really important/potentially life-ruining, ask a friend how it sounds before sending.
When we're having a conversation, it's easy to think on the fly, cut in with quick remarks, crack jokes, and have a good back-and-forth with the other person. We can raise our eyebrows, wink, and literally nudge the person to indicate we've just told a joke.
When it comes to writing, everything's a little more serious. The acts of writing and reading are more formal than talking. Words on the page are very final. Navigating the minefield is a lot easier if you know the difference between writing and talking.
A short introduction to the English language
Buckle up for a quick foray into the building blocks of the English language. I'll keep this section nice and short, but it's crazy how long it took me to learn what verbs are, so hopefully it'll be a helpful reminder for some of you.
Verbs – Doing words. Verbs describe actions that usually end in -ing. For example, skiing, running, sucking, hallucinating, and deplatforming are all verbs.
Nouns – Things. Nouns are objects, people, or places. Apple, cat, airplane, smartphone, population, and hallucination are all common nouns. Steve Jobs, iPhone, Ecuador, Jupiter, and Facebook are all proper nouns, which are always capitalized.
Adjectives – Description words used to qualify nouns. The cat is old, fat, green, grey, young, hallucinogenic, exciting.
Adverbs – Description words used to label verbs. The cat ran wildly, speedily, quietly, gently. Then and there are also adverbs.
All the other stuff – Articles are the, a, and an. Prepositions describe the where and when of something, including after, before, above, under, below, inside, outside, at, by, in, on, off, from, with, and of. Articles and prepositions are some of the most commonly used words.
Punctuation – Try to use a whole variety of punctuation in your writing. Punctuation can help convey tone; dashes, semicolons, colons, and brackets all have a different flavour and can really help your clarity.
Every sentence needs a combination of some or all of the above. You for sure need a subject, a verb, and a complete idea. Most sentences have more than just the basics; you can combine the most common few hundred words into endless combinations.
The internet isn't as strict as old-school magazines, books, or your sixth-grade English teacher. Typos and grammatical errors are pretty much expected. One way to stand apart is by nailing your basics. If you want to clarify your writing and avoid confusion, it helps to understand your tools.
How has writing changed over the last thousand years
It's weird to think that people hadn't heard of a novel a few hundred years ago. They're actually recent inventions. It's hard to imagine seeing Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote, The Princess of Cleves, or even Tale of Genji and thinking they're a new, crazy form of avant-garde art.
Before that it was mainly plays and poetry, and before that, jesters at court. Once upon a time, it was pretty much only noble people and monks who could read and write. Then, as technology and population increased, more and more people were educated, and fiction writing exploded.
Charles Dickens went on book tours through industrial England. A hundred years later, commuters read penny thrillers on the subway. A hundred years later, we'll have podcasts, blogs, vlogs, tweets, posts, audiobooks, and more.
Traditional publishing has been cut by a thousand wounds by disruptive new media. The question of whether or not the damage is fatal remains to be seen. I wonder if we'll have physical books in five hundred years.
That doesn't mean the written word is dead. People might not be reading novels on their way to work any more, but think about what you read today. I bet your eyes have scanned over hundreds if not thousands of words.
Even in our digital world, we read a message from a friend, a tweet from POTUS, changes to the Amazon terms and conditions (really?), the description of a show on Netflix, instructions on how to put on a face mask, and a whole bunch more.
The word will take something massive to disrupt it completely out of our lives. Neuralink might want to make us all telepathic, but the word is too good of a tool to be killed in our lifetimes. The better you understand your tools, the more you practice with them and hone them, keep them clean and sharp, the better your creations.
Give the internet what it wants
The internet is where everyone's reading these days. From self-publishing to blogs, websites, apps, ebooks, articles, comments, posts of all kinds, the list keeps going. In some ways it feels like we read less than ever, but if you think about it, a lot of people read thousands of words every day.
Like every other form, the internet has its own style. Like the paperback books published in the last century and the printed pamphlets of the century before, the internet's voice is recognisable and distinct from its predecessors.
The internet is casual but informed. Spelling matters less than facts. Punctuation barely matters at all. Readers are used to seeing text-speak – a mix of letters and numbers, condensed words and abbreviations.
Short sentences are better than long sentences. Paragraphs of three sentences or less are becoming the norm. Bold and italics are fine, as are exclamation points and capital letters. Sparingly used symbols are more effective.
One of the best rules I try to follow is to assume your reader is smarter than you. While you want to write to an individual reader, you're also writing for the collective. The collective readership, along with time and 20/20 hindsight, will always be smarter than you.
Fact-checking will happen and experts will uncover your bullshit. Don't be sloppy with your research, links, or facts – someone will call you out. Pleading ignorance doesn't cut it. It's cool how leveling the internet can be.
It's easy to access ridiculously specialized information online, from OpenCourseWare to Coursera to NCBI to Wikipedia to informative and historical videos on YouTube. There's an unbelievable treasure trove of high-quality information out there for free.
The internet's also a messy place. It sometimes feels like a Wild West without many rules, plenty of scams, and shady characters around every corner. But if you lie to your readers, it doesn't take long for them to figure you out.
Check out comments on Reddit, YouTube, Imgur, Twitter, and Quora to get an idea of what you're up against. It's entertaining, you'll learn a lot about the next generation of readers, plus you'll see how people really talk online.
To bait or not to bait
Clickbait runs the world. It's all about clicks, eyeballs, visits, traffic, data, and metrics. Smarter people than me figured out algorithms with math and now we're running, folks. To understand more about the importance of clicks, check out The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu.
Sure, you want people to read your writing, but don't be a douche about it. Clickbait has a cheap, gross, deceptive feel about it, like jail bait or live bait. Google's algorithms (and the others) are improving daily but blackhat and greyhat techniques still work.
Readers, as well as algorithms, are getting savvier. Most people can recognise a clickbaity link when they see it. There's also projects like StopClickBait on Facebook where trying to reduce the amount of bullshit online.
No one likes the feeling of clickbait. I've seen it from the user side as well as the writing side, and I assure you, writing clickbait sucks. If you're writing copy online, try to stop wasting time, the reader's and your own. It's up to us, the users and creators to clean up the internet. Together, let's make the internet great again.
10 ways I've improved my writing
I've been writing since 2008. I'm not the Greatest of All Time (yet), but I've come a long way since I started. Here are ten practices that improve my writing:
Read: Whatever you want. I don't care what you read as long as you do. You can't write if you don't read.
Write stream of consciousness: Three pages in the morning help me activate my brain and hand, getting them ready for the day of writing ahead. I got the idea from The Artist's Way.
Write every day: Try writing with a pen as well as on the computer. Write for five minutes or five hours. Write one stupid sentence on a Post-it. The more you write, the better you'll get.
Land a few entry-level freelance gigs: Not only do you get paid, but it helped me boost my confidence, made me write on various topics in numerous styles, and gave me an idea of what people are willing to pay.
Write 100,000 words per month: If you want to pay your bills with freelance writing, that's the number you'll have to hit when you're starting out. While it can be grueling, it's a good way to improve your pace, discipline, and stamina.
Eat healthy: I'm not an expert, but since learning how to cook and eat healthy food, my brain has churned out way better writing. There's plenty of people with PhDs talking about nutrition and diet on YouTube. Check out a few conflicting views then figure out what works best for you.
Work out: Taking care of your body can prevent the pitfalls that come with a sedentary lifestyle. When you're typing into a laptop, you're not moving your feet. Do hand and wrist exercises to reduce carpal tunnel (seriously), and do cardio for lung and heart health.
Meditate: Think about it like a workout for the mind. Staring at a screen all day leads to burnout, as does thinking all day. Find an app, sing a mantra, follow your breath, whatever you need to practice focusing on the present.
Tutor a teenager: This one might not be possible for everyone, but I've learned a ton about writing by tutoring high school kids for their exams. I've learned the mechanics and magic of the craft by trying to teach somebody else.
Be curious: Serve your imagination with inspiration as often as you can. Watch movies, listen to music, look at art, go into nature, dance, sing, laugh, take online courses, learn about everything you possibly can. A passion for learning might not be a prerequisite for being a writer but it sure as shit helps.
Reading list
These books have really helped me learn about the writing craft. Some are more inspiring and based around creativity, while others are technical handbooks on the mechanics and rules of writing and storytelling.
Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg
The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
On Writing by Stephen King
How to Write a Damn Good Novel by James Frey
Screenplay by Syd Field
Aristotle's Poetics for Screenwriters by Michael Tierno
Write your way to freedom
Learning to write clearly and effectively is one of the most important skills you can acquire. Better writing gets you what you want and where you want to be. Better writing brings people together, builds empathy, and breeds peace.
