Originally published December 28, 2017 on Quora
Recently, I was contacted by an engineer in Bangalore, India who’d been reading my responses on Quora. He was impressed with my writing style.
I was deeply flattered because my writing seems sophomoric, lacking depth. I cringe when I read The New Yorker, lamenting, “Why can’t I write that well?” and then agonizing that I ended a sentence with “well.”
Not good!
I then directed my new-found fan to my blog rajalary, and his response was that to be a writer someone needs a large vocabulary.
Having recently read No Country for Old Men by Carmac McCarthy, you don’t necessarily need a large vocabulary or proper use of apostrophes to become a popular writer. A few pages into the book, McCarthy writes, “Damn, he whispered. The sun was behind him so they couldnt very well have seen light reflect off the glass of the scope. They had just flat seen him.”
No doubt, McCarthy’s snappy dialogue, short chapters, perpetual twists-and-turns, everyday heroes and violent antagonist makes his books page-turners. You’re anxious to finish the book to learn what happens, but also dreading the horror that lies ahead as the plot progresses.
The reality is the success of writing hinges on readers, and not necessarily prose. Some of my best work, which I’ve excruciatingly edited, few people have read. Whereas content I’ve churned out for work has been viewed by millions on websites, social media, collateral, and promotions for Intel, Dell, and Microsoft.
My most fluid writing, and hands-down least edited (and no doubt riddled with typographic errors and quirky tenses) is my responses to Quora questions. I usually just start typing, and hope my prattle answers the questions and doesn’t contain too many errors. I started writing on Quora to escape my internal critic, and write more snappy, fun content like the brilliant Augusten Burroughs.
Being a good writer doesn’t necessarily lead to success as a published (and paid) author, and neither does being a popular writer mean you’re a great writer. For instance, Harlequin Romances are wildly popular, but none would be classified as masterpieces like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Charles Dicken’s David Copperfield, J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights or Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
I told my new Quora follower that I’d share a few tips for becoming a better writer. Here’s my initial thoughts:
Write What You Know or Love
One of my professors in college said, “Write what you know.” I’ve expanded the advice to “or what you love.” Think about it. If you’re writing an email to a close friend or family member, the words appear on the screen as fast as you can type. You fall into a groove as sentences turn into paragraphs, and ideas pop into your head quickly producing a page of text.
But when you set out to write about a topic that doesn’t interest you, it’s hard to form a logical sentence. And transitioning to another paragraph is agony. Unfortunately, ones work sometimes requires slogging through a writing assignment, which is on par with getting a tooth extracted without Novocain. Maybe it’s a year-end review, speaker notes for a presentation, documenting a process, or speech for an event.
That’s why if you’re writing for fun, choose to expound on something you know or enjoy. Write about your experiences, your family, your friends, your work. If you love model trains, spelunking on weekends, creating gardens that make your neighbors jealous, seeing the latest flicks, or contemplating space travel, go online and research publications on these topics, and then pitch an article to an editor. Or start out by answering a question on Quora, creating a blog, or writing for a local newspaper or interest group. Just write!
Read and Analyze What You Admire
Everyone. Every journalist, novelist, blogger, screenwriter, critic, social media guru, or diarist has a different writing style. No style is better than the other. They’re simply deemed more appropriate for specific mediums than others. Obviously, 140 characters doesn’t make a novel. And long prose isn’t ideal for content that is typically viewed on mobile devices.
The best writers are also avid readers, enjoying others’ writing, expanding their vocabulary, and discovering ways of improving structure, plot, and character development. If you like the way someone writes, then analyze their style from sentence and paragraph length to use of prepositional phrases and analogies, punctuation, chapters, headlines and subheads.
According to Wikipedia, “the point of good writing style is to express the message to the reader simply, clearly, and convincingly, [keeping] the reader attentive, engaged, and interested.”
The engineer who’d contacted me off Quora enjoys reading the reviews of film critic Sangeetha Devi Dundoo who writes for the newspaper The Hindu. In a recent review for the film Baahubali, she wrote, “With The Conclusion, the team makes The Beginning seem like child’s play. They raise the bar to give us a visually breathtaking film that also makes up for a few aspects that were found wanting in part one.”
Those two sentences draw in the reader, nudging them to not only read the rest of the review, but see the film. Dundoo’s writing style is conversational with lots of adjectives, and interesting combinations of words like “emotional heft,” “king-to be,” “beast mode,” “chunk of the drama,” and “fantastically-mounted spectacle is the climatic portion.”
Her style matches the Indian films she’s reviewing, creating excitement and painting a picture of what viewers will experience when they see the film.
In contrast, The New Yorker film critic Richard Brody has lengthy, layers sentences with prepositional phrases strung together with the same word, in this case “through.” In his review of Lady Bird, he writes, “Lady Bird takes its protagonist through adolescent solipsism to recognition and gratitude, through the hazards of friendship complicated by matters of self-image and self-imagination, through openhearted but uncertain fumblings of romance, through the unresolved and ever-mounting tensions of family life and the acknowledgment of its hard material practicalities, to a radiant reconciliation with her family, her home town, and herself.”
He then sums up the entire movie with a simple sentence, “Lady Bird’s fine-grained perceptions come with a delicate meter of social distinctions and, with it, the desire for the pleasures, the sense of freedom, that money can buy—money that her parents don’t have.”
Find authors (or journalists) whose work you admire, and analyze how they use language, punctuation, and sentence structure, then try to emulate aspects of their writing style.
Writing is Learned Not Taught
This is the most important tip. While you can read books about how to be a better writer, take classes, and find someone to critique and edit you work, unless you start writing, and writing often, you won’t become a better writer.
Writing is learned by doing. It’s staring at a blank screen (or sheet of paper) until you can start to type out a handful of words. It’s agonizing over how to transition to another thought or tighten up an overwritten section. It’s sighing when you realize your beautifully written sentence is out-of-place, and should be deleted. It’s wondering how to expand on an idea, and at the same time, pondering whether you’re rambling.
Happily, the more you write, the easier it gets. But like many learned activities, you reach plateaus, necessitating taking another look at your work, and stepping it up a notch.
Years ago, I was convinced I couldn’t write editorial. I interned at a magazine several times a week, hoping the editor would critique my work. Having never taken a journalism course or for that matter even read how to write for a newspaper or magazine, it never occurred to me there was a formula for writing articles, starting with the thesis sentence and then presenting the most information first. Once I learned the formula, I was able to leverage my writing experience to churn out decent articles.
What truly bumped up my writing was turning on advanced editing in Microsoft Word. When I use the “Spelling & Grammar” feature, I could see the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and percentage of passive sentences. It was mortifying to learn I was writing at an 8th grade or lower level, and a chunk of my sentences were passive.
The solution was to edit, edit, and edit… and learn how to write at a higher level in the active voice.
Find an Editor that Matches Your Writing Style
My final tip is to find a friend or professional editor that matches or complements your writing style. My grandmother used to edit my papers when I was a child so no doubt, my writing style matches hers.
When I got married, I asked my husband, an engineer, to edit my papers. Bad idea. His more rigid, straightforward writing style clashed with my lengthy sentences, and frequent use of preposition phrases and analogies. Many arguments also ensued over word usages.
Eighteen years later, my husband does a magnificent job of editing my work because he’s now akin to my writing style, and recognizes ways of improving the flow, usually by tightening up sentences, and adding in more descriptive language.
Finding an editor can be challenging because most people proofread for grammar and meaning, rather than structure. One of the best ways to get feedback on your writing is to take a class that spans several months where the instructor can review your work, and there’s sufficient time to write additional material that’s reviewed. Oftentimes, students critique each other’s work, which is invaluable. Many people enjoy the process of writing, but their work is mediocre. However, they’re excellent editors, which may be their true calling.
Taking a class enables writers to collaborate, and possibly form mutually beneficial partnerships with one being the writer, and the other the editor.
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