
Ask HN: What is your take on being a better writer? - anacleto
In a world of hyperbolic tweets and biased content marketing, we all be should better at writing. What is your take on being a better writer?
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zitterbewegung
I have been using hacker news comments to improve my writing and I get instant
feedback. After awhile I had ideas that were big enough to write blog posts.
From my experience in writing poetry is you must keep writing to really get
good . Another thing is that about 10% or less of what you write is going to
be any good. And 1% is going to be acceptable. Life isn't like college where
your performance is judged on each piece of writing. Your job is to maximize
that 1% so you just have to keep writing so you have enough exceptional pieces
of writing and then you will be a better writer .

~~~
ams6110
I don't think most upvotes or commentary here are driven by quality of
writing. For one, it's a given that there are many non-native English speakers
on this forum, and in general critiquing grammar or style is discouraged.

~~~
theparanoid
People upvote persuasive writing. Which matters, to me, as a writer.

~~~
notum
People upvote popular opinions. Say something volatile that creates any sort
of friction against the HN hive mind and it will be downvoted, regardless of
how intelligent and true.

~~~
d33
...which sounds like a great training field for persuasive writing ;)

~~~
notum
And word games. Any voting outcome on my previous comment reflects as as
"meta" and well thought out. As long as keep my mouth shut.

Damn it.

------
dang
I think the best writers actually enjoy writing. pg told me that to him an
unwritten essay is like an uneaten piece of cake. I realized that that feeling
is foreign to me. I'd probably be a better writer if I liked it more.

~~~
ahussain
This is a fair point but it's worth noting that lots of good writers don't
seem to enjoy writing. This where quotes like "writing is easy, you just take
a blank page, open a vein, and bleed" come to mind.

David Foster Wallace seemed to use writing as a way to treat his various
depressions and ailments - as a way to "continue" almost.

~~~
Mz
I often write because I NEED to. I don't necessarily _enjoy_ it per se, but I
upvoted dang because I can relate to "an unwritten essay is like an uneaten
piece of cake." That writing lives inside me and makes me crazy if I don't let
it out. It may not be the most fun I have ever had, but it has a need to
happen.

So perhaps enjoyment isn't the write word, but pg is describing a thing akin
to a hunger that must be satisfied. Dang doesn't have that impetus. I do. So I
write.

Perhaps someday I shall get read as well. ;-)

~~~
chauhankiran
Same here, many of my diary pages are filled with garbage, just because
thoughts make my mind crazy and to overcome with this craziness I write
occasionally.

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itamarst
1\. You need to write in a way that addresses your goals within the context of
a particular situation. I review a good book on the subject here:
[https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/06/15/writing-
book/](https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/06/15/writing-book/)

2\. You need to understand the idea of style: there are _multiple_ styles,
each with its own set of assumptions about how you address the reader, what
"truth" is, etc.. "Clear and Simple as the Truth" is a great book about the
idea of multiple styles, and one particular style (the classic one).

3\. Learn the practical style, which is suitable for many business writing
situations. "Style: basics of clarity and grace" by Williams and Colomb is
great book on the topic.

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bevan
Read the first few chapters of On Writing Well.

Omit needless words. There's a page in Stephen King's autobiography "On
Writing" where he shows an editor's comments on an article he wrote as a
teenager. Half of the words are crossed out. Remembering that example improved
my writing significantly.

Also, understand that writing is an iterative process. It can take 5-6 passes
to craft a good sentence.

~~~
PaulHoule
See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style)

~~~
anacleto
I've read "On Writing Well". Then I discovered "The Elements of Style". On
Writing Well opens your eyes to what bad writing is, "The Elements of Style"
explains how to write clearly.

"The Elements of Style" belongs to that 1% of books that are truly able to
change the way you think (and write).

I tried to apply what I learned in "The Element of Styles" and "On Writing
Well" to my company blog: [https://medium.com/plainflow/how-we-write-at-
plainflow-7e994...](https://medium.com/plainflow/how-we-write-at-
plainflow-7e994f9c4097)

~~~
mcguire
_The Elements of Style_ is contentious. Many of its prescriptions are
linguistically sketchy. On the other hand, it points out many things that many
people do badly.

E.B. White, the 'editor', was one of the best essayists around, but he didn't
particularly obey the rules in his own book.

------
Insanity
Just as others before me have mentioned here, to be a better writer you'll
need to put in time doing it. In addition to a lot of writing, I believe
reading will also help in making you a better writer.

I by no means can call myself good at writing, but I do learn from books I've
read and try to apply what I 'discover' in my own writing. Find an author you
like, read up on his works and see how he writes. If you like his works,
chances are you like his writing style and it might match what you're hoping
to create.

------
Mz
Good communication takes the effort of at least two parties: one "talking" (or
writing) and one "listening" (or reading in good faith). Good writing is honed
by finding some means to get your writing read and get some kind of feedback
on how effectively it is conveying your message. You can't develop as a writer
without that feedback.

In school, you get it from your teachers, but I was surprised to learn that
what I learned about writing in school really was just scratching the surface.
I have learned a lot more from talking with people online in forums like HN,
blogging and doing paid freelance writing. I am still struggling to get real
traction with my blogs. Although there is a long history of my comments in
forums getting ridiculous overreactions from people, it has been surprisingly
hard to translate that into meaningful engagement with my blog writing.

Writing is about communicating. Good grammar and all that matter, but it
matters more that you have something you need to convey for some reason.
Writing is merely the means to convey it. And that is wherein the work lies.

------
ellius
I hate to dump a laundry list of reading, but these all helped me
tremendously:

1\. Politics and the English Language (Orwell) 2\. The Age of the Essay
(Graham). 3\. On Writing (Stephen King) 4\. On Writing Well (Zinsser) 5\. The
Elements of Style (Strunk and White) 6\. Essential English for Journalists,
Editors, and Writers (Evans)

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smacktoward
There are two steps required to become a better writer.

1\. _Read._ Read everything. Read omnivorously. Read fiction and non-fiction,
books and newspapers and magazines and Web sites. Read works by live authors
and dead ones. Read stuff you wouldn't normally read. Part of developing your
own voice is learning to hear the music in other peoples'.

2\. _Write._ Write constantly. Write little notes and long essays. Write
stories. Write a journal. Write down what happened to you today and what you
dreamed last night. Write for an audience (even if it doesn't exist yet) and
write for yourself. Writing is the process of trying on new voices until you
find the one that fits you best. The only way to find the one that fits is to
try on a lot that don't.

~~~
veddox
Excellent comment, I couldn't agree more! Just two things to add:

For general language skills, find authors who have good style and read as much
of their work as you can. They might be well-known book authors (I personally
enjoy CS Lewis and EO Wilson, amongst others) or a newspaper with a high
standard of penmanship (to German readers I recommend Die Zeit, I'm not sure
what an English equivalent would be).

You should read a bit of everything, but emphasize the type of writing that
you are going to be doing yourself. For example, scientific papers require a
very different style of writing to, say, newspaper essays. You need to be
thoroughly acquainted with the type that is relevant to you. (Finding your
voice comes later, first you need to master the basics.)

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awinter-py
Direct experience leads to relevance. Have you ever read a piece of fiction or
journalism and been like 'this person lived this and is sharing the
experience'? Half of the creative process is identifying familiar, personal
things you take for granted that others will find useful.

Effective writers (from farm-content buzzfeed to copywriter bill bernbach to
pulitzer-winning journalist bill dedman) distill the most relevant events
they've personally seen into a structure that coneveys the experience in
order.

The delightful parody version of this is 'write what you know' in george lucas
in love
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0olm8478DE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0olm8478DE)
(and every writing manual). But the reason this line shows up everywhere is
that it's a good first step.

Also, spend only 30% of your time on the first draft. It's seldom any good.
Cultivate editors you trust who can work with you and meet you at the right
stage. Writer Julian Fellowes talks about 'editing stages' in the first minute
of this
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RSYT2gQFlQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RSYT2gQFlQ).

------
JoshCole
Hyperbolic? Being a better writer is useless...

I think the context that prefaces the question betrays a misunderstanding.

When you really start digging into crafting messages, you start finding out
things like the medium you work in actually changes how you should structure
your message. Famous examples of why this should be done exist, like the first
presidential debate that was both televised and broadcast on the radio. People
who saw the television thought one candidate had won the debate. People who
listened thought the other had won.

Twitter as a medium promotes a certain kind of content. Learning to be a
better writer isn't going to change that. If the goal of learning to be a
better writer is to prevent some sort of decline in writing as seen on
Twitter? Don't learn more about writing.

There are so many different kinds of writing and being better at one doesn't
mean you will be better at another. So really you're safe learning most of
writing. Unfortunately, you're bound to run across ideas like using a hook to
attract attention as quickly as possible.

Then you run the risk of joining the hyperbolic tweeters.

------
bdcravens
Are you talking about style, grammar or ethics? Hyperbolic tweets and biased
content marketing can be written well, communicating exactly what the author
intended.

~~~
mcguire
I prefer my tweets hypergolic.

------
Maro
Really good, short book that you will learn a lot from and can apply the next
day when writing emails.

HBR Guide to Better Business Writing

[https://www.amazon.com/HBR-Guide-Better-Business-
Writing/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/HBR-Guide-Better-Business-
Writing/dp/142218403X)

Also, in general all "HBR Guide to _____" books are awesome.

------
ktaylor
Writing takes a tremendous amount of time and effort to just gain basic
competency, let alone master. You have to put in a lot of butt-in-seat time.

Though I've gotten paid to write for a technology website, I am not a strong
writer. But, I currently spend about 10 hours a week writing for my blog and
other mediums and am continuously trying to get better.

Assuming one is putting in the time and effort, the next thing that will most
quickly speed improvement is having an editor or other competent reviewer
provide critical feedback, including on grammar, structure, and style. Then,
keep rewriting a piece until you are no longer unhappy with it.

------
kabdib
Practice regularly and non-trivially for a long period of time. Figure on
years. (Joe Haldeman recommends writing 1,000 words a day for ten years).

Find an honest editor, someone who will give you objective feedback and
correct your mistakes.

I wrote a bunch and thought I was pretty good at technical documentation, and
hey, I've got this blog I maintain [well, less now]. Then a _real_ editor got
hold of an effort of mine and it came back to me with many, many corrections.
And you know, it was a LOT better; I couldn't argue with any of it.

And I know that Strunk and White is out of style, but I still recommend it.

------
ErrantX
Write a lot.

Have people read it; especially people with no incentive to just "be nice
about it".

Write a lot.

A great tip to improve your writing is that sentences of varied length seem
more natural.

Write a lot.

Ignore most of the rules. You stick to most rules by default but breaking them
is what can make a piece excellent.

Write a lot.

Get great at research. Unless you are writing about yourself, your life or
your experiences then you will need data to make the work come to life.

Write a lot.

Remember the 10,00 hour rule. To be great at something takes work and
practice. So find a way to practice regularly and daily. I spent ~10 years
writing Wikipedia articles.

------
vikingcaffiene
Being able to effectively communicate ideas via written word is crucial in
technical fields. It's not even about blog posts or tweeting -although that's
perfectly valid. We work in thoughts and ideas and they don't exist if we
can't accurately describe them.

If anyone is interested in writing better non fiction I recommend "On Writing
Well" by William Zinsser. It's compact and full of easy wins that one can
translate quickly into their day to day written correspondence etc.

------
pjc50
This is subject- and field-specific. Years ago someone pointed me at
[http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/goodwriting.h...](http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/goodwriting.html)
on _legal_ writing, which contains two excellent first points: "1) Have a
point" and "2) Get to the point".

Technical writing is a genre all its own.

------
inputcoffee
1\. Revise

2\. Practice

3\. Turn off the TV, and social media

(You can apply this to a lot of other things)

Not sure what you mean by "take" though. I think it is both good and
important, if that is what you were asking.

------
raamdev
I started a habit of writing 1,000 words every single day with the intention
of improving my writing. I've written at least 1,000 words every single day
for the past 291 days (okay, I missed one day at day 264). The writing has
been in a private journal, not on public blog, although I've published
hundreds of thousands of words to my blog over the past 15 years, just not
much in the past few years.

I'd say the greatest insight that I've had from writing 1,000 words every
single day for nearly the past year has been that simply writing 1,000 words
every single day is not enough to foster real improvement. The habit
definitely helps you overcome the initial resistance that you might feel
towards _getting started_ , and if you're not already good at typing or
transferring thoughts in your head into words on the screen, I'm sure it helps
with that too, but there comes a point at which, if you actually want to
continue _growing_ and _becoming a better writer_ , you need a goal other than
"write every day".

For me, the act of writing something that I intend to publish, to share with
others, forces me to work on the writing, to tweak it, to think about how it
can be made better, to question its clarity, to question the value of what I'm
sharing. If what I'm intending to share contains a story, then knowing that
it's going to be shared forces me to work on storycraft, to think about how
someone else is going to interpret what I wrote. None of that happens
naturally when you write privately, when your only goal is to see the word
counter pass 1,000.

I've found that the greatest advancements in my own writing have come when I
was blogging regularly (comparing posts from one year to another makes this
very obvious). Whenever I've stopped blogging regularly for long periods of
time, I find that my writing stops improving, even if the overall amount of
writing I'm doing on a regular basis doesn't change that much (e.g., Slack
messages, comments like these, etc.).

I'm not saying that you cannot improve as a writer when you write privately,
just that improvement requires working toward specific goals that you know
will challenge you to improve. Write a haiku. Write a short story. Look up
from your laptop, find an object, and then try to write 1,000 words describing
that object in as fine detail as possible. Do the same thing with an emotion
that you've felt. And if you can, share what you write. Even if others don't
give you feedback, the very knowledge that somebody, somewhere, will likely be
judging your writing will cause you to subconsciously work a little harder to
write better, to _rewrite_ and to _edit_ (which is the work that actually
produces _good_ writing).

~~~
falsedan
1k words a day teaches you how to quickly write a lot of words. This is a
great skill for a pulp fiction writer/freelance copywriter, but not so great
when you're not getting paid by the word.

My goal is to write 1+ words a day.

------
ams6110
Reading a lot of good writers, and trying to notice and understand why they
are good.

I think that's what has helped me the most. Sure a few rules of thumb such as
"omit needless words" and "eschew obfuscation" but mostly just reading a lot.

------
wj
Like others I do not feel as if I understand the question and feel as if the
question could have been phrased better by a better writer.

Do I think writing is important? Yes. I automatically disqualify a job
candidate if their writing is poor.

Do I think writing skills have gone down? Yes. However this did not happen
recently. I noticed it in 1997-1998 as my younger brother's generation
starting to spend more time using instant messaging on the computer than they
were doing their homework.

Do my views represent society at large? I am afraid they do not. I am
continually flabbergasted by the comments that I see on YouTube and on news
websites. In my opinion either schools are failing us or society is. Either
way it has become clear that people are rewarded in the communities they deem
important by being confrontational and derogatory without formulating and
conveying a proper argument.

~~~
matt4077
Youtube comments are written by people who would, in previous times, barely
ever have written anything for general consumption. I'm not sure if the
impression that everything was better in the past isn't a serious observation
bias.

After all, with the advent of first SMS, then messenger platforms, the average
teenager is probably using the written word a few magnitudes more often than
the generation that grew up in, say, the 1990s. If you go further back, maybe
young people still wrote letters. But there was definitely a gap of at least a
decade or two where writing was strictly reserved for unpleasant things. Sure,
they're using various shortcuts, emojis, slang, and not enough capitalisation.
But it's hard not to see most of that as a rather creative adaptation of
language to new mediums.

What has changed is the audience that people with rather strange views can now
command. I'm not even talking about youtube celebrities or 'twitter thought
leaders'; just your average Joe from Sacramento who thinks it's high times
these lying journalists get stomped to ground. He's now writing that down, and
maybe 10 people read it, and he reads 10 similar things about
jews/scientists/the CIA virus to start the next civil war etc. Where before,
your opinions were regularly brought back into something like a mainstream
consensus, you can now find approval for almost anything, if you just try.

Let's see how that ends...

------
taphangum
Understand your audience.

Speak their language.

Say what you really want to say.

------
theparanoid
If you want to get ahead, write persuasively. Cialdini's book "Influence: The
Psychology of Persuasion" is good for technique.

------
falsedan
Say what you mean; lead with the idea you want to communicate; don't waste
peoples' time.

edit: always be practicing, revising, improving.

------
anjalik
How much do they even teach this in school?

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mythrwy
That is aint's all that gol danged importunt?

------
platz
I don't understand the premise/motivation of the question.

~~~
dang
We changed the title from "Ask HN: We should all be better at writing" to the
question in the text above.

~~~
anacleto
thank you, Daniel.

