Unfortunately, there aren’t too many ways to cheat the learning curve. “Write a lot” really is the first-order answer, and it’s usually the one given by professionals that don’t stand to make any money from their answer. Writing workshops and other ‘accelerants’ seem to be very questionable.
A friend who was recently signed as a science fiction author at Tor suggests that you could try compressing things that you have already written. Take something like a blog post, and express the same ideas and content using half the words. This will help with clarity and concision, as you get better at the exercise- one of the telltale signs of an amateur writer is that they use words inefficiently.
What I am doing is to express myself using Twitter. Plenty of times I noticed that I want to use more characters than allowed and that I need to cut down on my writing. With time I’ll allow myself to move on to larger formats.
No point in using many words for what can be said in few.
Personally I crige every time I read a book or blog post where it is more than obvious that the author’s point can be summarised in a couple of sentences. Though it might be a weakness of my mind that I have nothing to write about that would warrant a blog post of its own or anything longer than two sentences.
The Twitter therapy in general is for people who like to have extreme challenges and find it difficult to use fewer words. In school it was a mystery to me how people could write so much about the exact same assignment I did, where I used about 50% fewer words. The teacher went on to institute a minimum and a maximum word count to reign in these excesses. Granted, writing an essay consisting of only 150 words is extreme, but to stay competitive in today’s information overloaded world requires authors to be brief, to make their point very clear from the beginning, to use only the exact words they need. Longer, more foreign arguments need longer text, but most thought I have seen is not complex enough to warrant that much text.
No matter how brief you think you are, there are superfluous words, as I tried to show with the three paragraphs above.
Assume moderate literacy for an academically inclined individual. Hypothesis: “Read a lot” is less valuable than “Write a lot” which in turn less valuable than “Read and write a lot”.
Unfortunately, there aren’t too many ways to cheat the learning curve. “Write a lot” really is the first-order answer, and it’s usually the one given by professionals that don’t stand to make any money from their answer. Writing workshops and other ‘accelerants’ seem to be very questionable.
A friend who was recently signed as a science fiction author at Tor suggests that you could try compressing things that you have already written. Take something like a blog post, and express the same ideas and content using half the words. This will help with clarity and concision, as you get better at the exercise- one of the telltale signs of an amateur writer is that they use words inefficiently.
What I am doing is to express myself using Twitter. Plenty of times I noticed that I want to use more characters than allowed and that I need to cut down on my writing. With time I’ll allow myself to move on to larger formats.
Sharpening the one-liner skills is definitely worth it. I got on Usenet and my sentence quality went through the roof.
OTOH, my ability to write anything over five coherent paragraphs atrophied and I had to relearn it.
No point in using many words for what can be said in few.
Personally I crige every time I read a book or blog post where it is more than obvious that the author’s point can be summarised in a couple of sentences. Though it might be a weakness of my mind that I have nothing to write about that would warrant a blog post of its own or anything longer than two sentences.
The Twitter therapy in general is for people who like to have extreme challenges and find it difficult to use fewer words. In school it was a mystery to me how people could write so much about the exact same assignment I did, where I used about 50% fewer words. The teacher went on to institute a minimum and a maximum word count to reign in these excesses. Granted, writing an essay consisting of only 150 words is extreme, but to stay competitive in today’s information overloaded world requires authors to be brief, to make their point very clear from the beginning, to use only the exact words they need. Longer, more foreign arguments need longer text, but most thought I have seen is not complex enough to warrant that much text.
No matter how brief you think you are, there are superfluous words, as I tried to show with the three paragraphs above.
I read your third paragraph and thought “this sounds like my writing” :-(
“Read a lot” is actually the first-order answer.
Assume moderate literacy for an academically inclined individual. Hypothesis: “Read a lot” is less valuable than “Write a lot” which in turn less valuable than “Read and write a lot”.
Zeroth-order, maybe.