Writing
Love to write~
Writing
Practical things you can do to make your text clearer.
Open two copies of the same document and put them side-by-side. Edit in one, while referring to the other.
Rewrite your first draft using this rule: no significant words from the first draft are allowed in the second draft.
If your sentence has more than two commas in it, it’s probably too long.
I... See more
Open two copies of the same document and put them side-by-side. Edit in one, while referring to the other.
Rewrite your first draft using this rule: no significant words from the first draft are allowed in the second draft.
If your sentence has more than two commas in it, it’s probably too long.
I... See more
gilest.org: Clarity hacks
50 Powerful reading tips from the four smartest readers I've come across:
1) Read what you love until you love to read.
2) Reading a book isn’t a race—the better the book, the more slowly it should be absorbed.
3) Read out of curiosity and interest. The best book... See more
Some points to defend the POV that “essay quality is objective.”
Specific scope: You have to set the scope small enough to “essays.” Books, memoirs, newsletter and other written mediums have their own criteria. Songs and films are even more different. I think it’s important not to get bogged down in genre, and instead to see genre as a culturally
It reminds me of writing and how I wake up week after week and get stuck on the blank page again and again. How I always despair that I have no more good ideas and, even if I did, not enough eloquence to convey said ideas. But I love it still. I love how writing brings everything to the surface, how it generates and absorbs my attention. How it
... See morein praise of slowing down
Embedding place into your writing is an interesting and engaging way to write. When you read the stories again in the future they will help you to connect back to the place where you wrote them.
Andrew Anderson • The Ritual of Writing: Writing as Spiritual Practice
There’s definitely a place for stream of consciousness. My sense is that the more analytical, slow, and entrenched my editing process for long form is, the better my one-take typewriter essays are. There’s a world in which the patterns of the craft become automatic, and over 50% of what you make is ready to go. I think it’s extremely rare to start
... See moreA writing example: when I look back in my notes I realize so much of what I write about today I was ruminating about 2-3 years ago. I always knew what I was going to say. I just didn’t have the tools, I didn’t have the maturity, I didn’t have the language or sensitivity to beauty to recognize what that was. So much of what I learned was latent,... See more