writing

By applying a simple tone, short phrases and concise writing, the design of your wording draws more people in.

Good writing gets the reader’s dopamine flowing in the area of the brain known as the reward circuit. Great writing releases opioids that turn on reward hot spots. Just like good food, a soothing bath, or an enveloping hug, well-executed prose makes us feel pleasure, which makes us want to keep reading.

Finishing means failing. If you always stay in the drafting stage, success—however you define it—is always on the horizon. But failing is how we teach ourselves to write.

According to this Wall Street Journal veteran, the key to obit writing — or more expansive memoir, for that matter — can be summed up in three questions: What were you trying to do with your life? Why? And how did it work out?

If you write “Profits are loved by investors,” for example, instead of “Investors love profits,” you’re switching the standard positions of the verb and the direct object. That can cut comprehension accuracy by 10% and take a tenth of a second longer to read.

Intended fiction writers often go into newspapering or advertising, where they can use their gift without taking the plunge into their dreamed-of fiction-writing career.

A work of fiction can be understood as a three-beat movement: a juggler gathers bowling pins; throws them in the air; catches them.

So perhaps our teaching (online and off) should be seen — and is generally taken — not as the passing of truths de haut en bas but as just one part of a fruitful or at least hopeful collaboration.

Years ago scientists thought our brains decoded words as symbols. Now we understand that our neurons actually “embody” what the words mean: When we hear more-specific ones, we “taste,” “feel,” and “see” traces of the real thing.

Remarkably, the simulation may extend to our muscles too. When a team led by an Italian researcher, Marco Tettamanti, aske