5 Ways to Improve Your Writing

- This video is sponsored by Skillshare.

Among his many other accomplishments,

Benjamin Franklin was one of the most well-respected writers of his time,

but that wasn't always the case.

Early on in his career at one point,

Benjamin Franklin found himself in the midst of an epistolary duel,

which basically just means he was arguing with somebody through letter writing.

And at one point during this argument Benjamin Franklin's father found these letters.

And in typical dad fashion,

took the opportunity to tell old Ben just how bad his writing was.

Now, most of us probably wouldn't want our dads critiquing our writing,

we'd get a little defensive.

But Benjamin Franklin took this criticism to heart.

And in response, he started seeking out the best writing he could get his

hands on,

so he could deliberately study it and start honing his writing craft.

And through this process, he became that well-respected writer and thinker.

Now, you might not have "Become the most well-respected writer of my generation" at

the top of your to-do list,

but even if that's not the case,

improving your writing skills is one of the best things you can do for

moving forward in your career

and becoming a better communicator.

So today I wanna share five huge tips for improving your writing,

whether it's a cover letter or a novel,

we're gonna talk about ways to improve how often you write,

building a writing habit,

but we'll also talk about some ways to improve the clarity of your writing

and also how interesting it is.

Let's actually start there, this interesting, this angle.

How do you make your own writing more interesting and more fun to read?

Well, this reminds me of a quote I once heard somewhere,

or maybe I made it up, I'm not sure, but it goes like this.

"An interesting person is an interested person."

In other words, if you want your writing to have some flare to it,

go out and apply your interest, both to cool experiences,

but also to learning from a wide variety of sources.

And that's the first main tip here, read widely.

As the author Cormac McCarthy once put it, "Books are made out of books."

And the best authors are the ones who have a wide repertoire of experiences

and knowledge,

and different authors they've read to pull from,

so they can take things

and creatively mash them up into something you've never read before.

If you only read one author or one genre, then,

your writing is gonna feel kind of samey.

It's like trying to cook a chicken with nothing

but black pepper on your spice rack.

If you wanna make something truly delicious, and truly interesting to eat,

then you may wanna have some more spices on that spice rack.

So expand your reading palette.

And if you wanna do this in a way similar to how Ben Franklin

did it,

then also try to actively engage with what you read as well.

One good way to do this is

when you come across a phrase

or passage that you really like,

pause, ask yourself, "Well, how would I write this?"

Or, "How would another author "that I really like write this?"

And in asking yourself this question, going through this mental remixing exercise,

you're engaging with the material in a way that's much more intense than

if you just read it

and then passed on.

I'm also in the habit of highlighting these passages

and saving them to my Readwise

so I can come back to them

and ponder them sometimes.

This is one that has been stuck in my head particularly as of late.

"Night City was like a deranged experiment "in social Darwinism,

"designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb "permanently on the fast-forward button."

So actively engaging with a wide array of material is a great way to

sort of build an armory of different weapons you can use for different challenges,

different situations, but if you wanna be able to use them to wield them

well,

then you need to write often, build the skill of writing.

And as you probably know, writing often is kind of hard to do.

I see writing as kind of like riding a bicycle,

it's all about building momentum.

And that first initial challenge of getting on the bike is usually the hardest

one.

After that, a lot of times you can coast,

put a little bit of effort in and you keep moving forward.

So how do you build that initial bit of momentum?

So one way you can do this is to build for yourself a writing

ritual,

which is basically a set of habits

that make getting into the writing process a little bit easier.

This can get you over that resistance.

And this can involve writing in a specific place

or having a list of things

that you do before you start writing.

Personally, when I was writing my book,

"10 Steps to Earning Awesome Grades,"

which I think I published about six years ago now,

there was this little office in the leasing office in my apartment building where

you could go to study.

It had wifi, it had totally blank walls,

and it had this wooden desk going around the border of the room.

That was basically it.

So it wasn't a very fun place to be,

but it was a place where my video games weren't there,

my friends were there, it was total solitude.

So I would go there

and I would put in my 500 words per day,

which I kind of used that goal to get this book done,

and there was this sort of motivation.

I would go in there and I kind of wanted to leave.

So I would get my 500 words done as quickly as possible.

Or at least I thought that, because interestingly enough,

once you build the writing momentum in the beginning of a session,

you often now have those creative juices flowing.

You're in a state of flow and you will write more, in many cases,

than you thought you would.

So I went there with the intention of doing 500 words,

and came out having written 1,500 or sometimes 2000.

So having a specific writing place,

even a place that's kind of not all that pleasant, can be helpful.

And you can also have certain habits in your writing ritual as well.

Maybe having some noise-canceling headphones

that let you have some more control over the environment where you're writing,

maybe having a specific playlist that you like to write to.

I've got one called Sunday Study

that I almost always use

when I write and I'll have

that linked in the description below,

if you wanna check it out,

or maybe having a specific scent or a specific drink,

like a candle that you write with,

or making a cup of coffee or a cup of tea.

Whatever it is, find your writing ritual

and use it to get over

that writing resistance.

Now, we used the bike metaphor before,

and I stand by the belief that starting is the hardest part.

But just like bike riding, writing-- Writing, riding, writing.

Writing is about keeping momentum going.

When you're in a session,

you wanna keep the flow going

so you can keep creative things coming out of your brain

and onto the page.

And one of the biggest killers of that momentum is editing while you write.

So the next big tip is to separate your writing process from your editing

process.

When you edit your writing, when you see a sentence that you just wrote,

and you're like, "I gotta go back

and change that," "I saw a spelling error,

I gotta go back

and fix that," you're actually getting into a different state of mind,

you're doing a context switch,

and you're now in a mind state that is less creative.

You've arrested that momentum.

And if you're constantly editing what you've just written,

then you really never get any good momentum going in the first place.

Another metaphor that I like to use for writing is of mining for gold.

If you never get down to, I don't know,

20 feet deep under the ground,

you're never gonna get the gold in the first place.

So you have to build enough momentum to excavate a bunch of dirt,

a bunch of not very useful stuff,

to get to the point in a writing session where the real good gems

come out.

You can come back and edit them later.

The other point of this is

that you often don't know what the end product is going to look like

after you've gone through several different iterations.

So it's kind of pointless to try and do a first draft that's perfect,

because it's always gonna change.

A great example of this, maybe my favorite,

comes from the cinematic masterpiece that is "Emperor's New Groove."

If you don't know about the troubled history of this movie,

when it started out in development,

it was supposed to be a much more serious story kind of in the

vein of the "Lion King,"

that kind of a feel.

And what we ended up with was this buddy comedy movie,

one of Disney's best movies ever,

but very different than it initially had been conceptualized.

So just realize that what you start writing right now is probably not gonna

look anything like your final product.

So just let yourself get ideas onto the paper.

Like I say, get a mess on the paper,

and you can come back later and clean that mess up.

It's a lot easier than trying to craft something perfect from a blank page.

Okay, so let's look at the edit process now.

You've got your first draft down on the paper or on the computer screen,

and now you wanna hone it

and make it as good

as it can be.

What's the first step to doing that?

Well, I think a good first candidate is reading your writing out loud,

like I'm gonna do right now with this script.

"We tend think of writing

as a silent art form

"but it has a lot more in common with music "than you might think.

"And because we don't often think about this fact,

"we often overlook another very important piece "of good writing, rhythm.

"For example, you might use too many sentences "of similar lengths in a row.

"For example, you might keep using similar phrases "or you might elongate your sentences,

"leaving the length a little too long, "stringing too many clauses together,

"running on and on and on.

"You might also just use phrases "that have a lot of similarity,

"or you might have simply a word."

Simply a word, "Simply forgotten a word."

See?

Now, reading out loud can feel a bit awkward,

especially if there's another person in the room.

Ask me, I go through scripts all the time with my editor in the

room.

And yes, it is a little bit awkward.

But if you don't do it,

you're liable to gloss over things

that could help make the reading experience less awkward for your reader.

And that's really the most important thing, right?

Reading out loud not only exposes you to the rhythm of your writing,

but it also slows you down necessarily.

When we read silently, when we're reading for comprehension,

we read between 200 to 400 words per minute on average.

When we're scanning through our own writing, trying to find little things to fix,

we go even faster than that.

And the faster you go, the easier it is to skip over things.

But when we read out loud,

most people can't read comfortably out loud at more than 150 words per minute.

And at that pace, it's very easy to pick out spelling errors, grammar issues,

or opportunities to simplify.

And that's our last tip here.

There's this great quote in the book "On Writing Well" from the author Williams

Zinsser that goes,

"The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence "to its cleanest components."

I wanna give you a great example of this.

Back in World War II, President Franklin D.

Roosevelt's aids put out this statement, and this is a mouthful,

so bear with me here.

"Such preparations shall be made

"as will completely obscure all Federal buildings

"and non-Federal buildings "occupied by the Federal government "during an air raid for any

period of time from visibility "by reason of internal

or external illumination."

President Roosevelt took that and changed it to this,

"Tell them that in buildings "where they have to keep the work going "to

put something across the windows."

He removed 20 words of that original sentence,

and the ones that were remaining got way, way simpler, and in doing so,

he communicated so much more,

because the original blurb of text actually communicated nothing to most people.

If you felt your brain kind of sliding out of your ear

when I read that first blurb,

you're not alone.

It was a bunch of jargon.

It was almost impossible to understand.

And sometimes, your own writing takes on a similar quality.

Sometimes, we're trying to sound smart and use big vocabulary.

Sometimes, we don't even really consider the simplicity

and it gets a little bit too complex.

And simplicity doesn't necessarily mean stripping things down to as few words as possible,

because sometimes, words add color, words add description,

they make things more vivid and interesting.

But a lot of times,

words are there just because we want them to be there.

We have a lot of, I think, trauma,

from our teachers telling us word limits

that we had to hit for essays in high school

and in elementary school,

right?

And a lot of times,

we're trying to use big words that make us sound a little bit intelligent.

But from a reader's perspective,

they would almost always rather have you use the word use than utilize,

words than lexicon, because it's easier to parse, easier to understand.

These big words don't really add anything to the reading experience.

If you wanna take your writing even further,

there's a great class on Skillshare all about writing personal essays from Roxanne Gay,

who has written for the New York Times

and has written several published books of her own.

It's a fantastic class that'll help you hone your writing skills

and help you apply them to personal essays,

personal statements for job applications,

all kinds of stuff

that comes up in the daily life of even non-writers.

And because her class is on Skillshare, when you get access to it,

you get access to thousands of other classes.

And writing is a hugely well-represented area on Skillshare.

There are classes on writing with humor.

There are classes on writing fiction.

There are a ton of classes that can hone your skillset in this area.

So it's a great way to, just as Ben Franklin once did,

start deliberately practicing, deliberately studying.

Also on Skillshare, you're gonna find a few classes from yours truly.

I've got one on productivity for creatives,

which has a whole section on building that creative writing habit,

which can also be applied to any other creative work.

I've got classes on building your productivity system, on building strong habits.

So it's also a great place for becoming more productive.

And Skillshare is a very affordable learning platform too,

with their annual plans starting at less than 10 bucks a month.

And that's just the normal pricing.

Actually right now, if you're one of the first 1,000 people to click the

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Doing that is also a great way to support this channel.

So if you choose to support my sponsors, seriously, thank you so much.

And thank you for watching this video all the way to the end.

Seriously, you are awesome.

Got one last thing here, and that is to ask you a simple question.

What is your best writing tip that I didn't mention in this video?

Leave your answer in the comments down below.

We can all learn together, become better writers together.

And I've got a playlist of videos here with some more writing tips,

writing apps I've recommended in the past.

So check them out, if you're curious.

Beyond that, you can get subscribed if you haven't done so already,

or go and do literally whatever you want, 'cause, as always,

I'm not your dad.