Quick Tricks for Better Writing
by cormac siegfried
Happy Friday! This article offers a few tactics and tricks to quickly up-level your internal editor, helping you become the best writer you can be. I am getting into some weeds so if you aren’t interested in improving your writing, scroll on and enjoy the day! If you are interested in becoming a better writer, great! Read on.
I use all of these tricks every day just to write texts that make my friends smile. And they happen to be handy when writing at the CMO or director level, too.
1. Purpose.
Always know your purpose when writing. Then always question your purpose when writing because no one deserves happiness. Only joking, but really, force every word, sentence, and paragraph to justify its existence.
The first thing I do when I write something is write at the top of the page why I am writing the thing. What is my goal-for-now? Not only does this make the white space look less intimidating, but it also frames what content should and shouldn’t stay.
This is important because knowing what and when to delete is a beautiful writing skill. The beauty becomes clear when you feel stuck and you realize you can simply delete the sentence or paragraph that has you frazzled. Next time you find yourself at an impasse, ask yourself, “what if I just delete it?” Please, keep this idea to writing. You can’t just delete your problems to feel better. But deleting a sentence or paragraph and discovering that your text hasn’t lost any meaning is a very good feeling. You have just made yourself easier to understand while reducing the number of words used to communicate.
2. Avoid repetition. Most of the time.
There are two basic types of repetition in writing: message repetition and language repetition. Both can make you seem brilliant and both can give you the literary cadence of a snail.
Language repetition usually tells you you need to reword your text. If you see the same word at the start of more than one sentence in a row, that is a signal to edit. Ask yourself; does this pattern help you? Or are you just lazy? If you see the same word in a paragraph, almost always you should find another word. You’ll always need to repeat some words, the words that define the basic structure of language - you, a, that, the, if, when, who, etc. But forcing yourself to avoid repetition will make you more creative through constraint.
When used well, language repetition can be very powerful. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech used language repetition to awesome effect. If you please your sense for beauty, perhaps your language repetition is justified.
Message repetition can be helpful when conveying something new or complex. Malcolm Gladwell would be broke if he couldn’t sell books that repeat the same message over and over, if always in unique ways. Because he finds new and interesting ways to repeat his message, people buy his books instead of beating him with them. Repetition can be a fantastic tool for succeeding with communication. But do it like Gladwell: with research, brevity, and always discrete analogies, metaphors, or stories communicating the message.
3. Writing.
Getting going on a writing project is just plain hard. Ann Handley offers a great trick to finishing writing projects. I have used it to great success since reading her book. It is simple. Always stop when you are on a roll, not when you have nothing left to say. When you stop writing just as you are biting to write more, you will have something to say the minute you sit down to write again. Your mind will be inspired to keep developing new things to say as you take a break from the piece. If you stop writing when demoralized and feeling useless, you won’t want to get back to it. You might even start dreading the looming prospect of finishing the project. No. Stop writing when the writing is good and all you’ll feel is good. That is the theory. And like whiskey, it works until it doesn’t!
3.1 When checking your piece for grammatical errors, read your text backward. This breaks your mind’s organization of the story and lets you focus on each sentence individually to check them for faults.
3.2 If you want something to be really good, read it aloud. Imagine reading it on a date. Are you apologizing for yourself already? Try again.
3.3 When confronted with an odd-sounding sentence or difficult grammatical quandary, try moving pieces of the sentence around. An example I found while writing this article: from “Only joking, but really, look at every word, sentence and paragraph, and force it to justify its existence.” to “ Only joking, but really, force every word, sentence, and paragraph to justify its existence.”
3.4 My last trick is controversial. I take it to the extreme but I do not mean for you to feel so pressured. I happen to treat writing as my core competency, the core consistency that enables me to succeed in both my personal and professional lives. If you are like me and want to become the best writer you can be, do not use tools like Grammarly, text completion, spell check, or any of the now common writer-automation or helper tools. Halfway through 2019, I noticed that my instinct for spelling and grammar was diminishing, causing me great uncertainty when advising clients on language. My solution was simple; eliminate the tools completing spelling and grammar for me. Including those built into my phone. My spelling ability has returned and I can again craft and defend complex sentences without second-guessing myself. Just kidding, I still second-guess myself all the time - but I’m much more confident without these tools than with them.
From a higher-level perspective, I believe these services are problematic for the development of language. They inherently treat it as something static when really it is a dynamic, living organism. They are also not intelligent enough to enhance your ability to explore meaning, which is much of the value in writing. Your words should help you see a larger world more clearly. These services promote the homogenization of language, making for a smaller, less diverse world.
Thank you for reading my article on writing! I sincerely hope you appreciated the time it took away from your quarantine and I especially hope that you are inspired to write your way through this momentous period of history. Cheers!