As you will probably have noticed before the end of this question, I’m a relatively mediocre writer. I mean, I’m not that bad, I know a lot of people who are worse at it than I am, but I still often notice a pattern in basically everything I write: exceedingly long and complex sentences, giving masses of detail with little apparent regard for how much information the person at the other end actually needs, “stick-on” weird metaphors which appear randomly every time I’m afraid I’m being too technical or annoying (so you get a wall of annoying text with a bit of canned laughter in the middle…), vague sentences that go around for a while as I’m slowly figuring out what I mean to say, long paragraphs, etc. Also, I spend ages proofreading anything I write and worrying about it…
Anyway, I’d like to get better at it. And LW is full of good writers, so surely someone will have advice?
I know the standard piece of advice is “write more stuff”, or maybe “read The Sense of Style, or something”. And I’ve done both these things, and they’ve helped, but I’m still a pretty mediocre writer. I’m still writing somewhat more than the average person, but if I want to go beyond that and practice even more, it will have to mean a deliberate effort to improve my writing. And if I decide to deliberately improve my writing using advice that’s not more specific than “write more stuff, and then some more again”, my efforts will soon fall into that deep endless cave where people drop their New Year resolutions every 15th January…
So, any ideas?
Consider reading:
Editing advice for LW users
Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace (and doing the exercises)
For editing grammar, passing through GPT-4 can be pretty good, but you have to be very clear in your prompting to get it to change nothing else.
(Somewhat obvious advice, but hopefully useful.)
Thanks! I hadn’t seen those. They’re similar to the sort of stuff I had already seen, but seem particularly actionable, when actionability was the main problem of what I had found.
Seconding “Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace”. Amazing explanation of effective written communication.
I would only add this, for the original poster: when you read what the book suggests, reflect on why it’s doing so.
When I read “Style” the second time around, it occurred to me how hard reading really is, and that all this advice is really for building a sturdy boat to launch your ideas at the distant shores of other minds.
Like, you can have some really bright people working for you, but if you add even a little more nuance, like an “and” and a second clause, you’ve lost. So the trick appears to be finding a shared language with the people you can think together with.
Paul Graham, one of the best technical writers I know, wrote an article called “Writing, Briefly”. I’ll quote it in full.
I’ve landed three jobs thanks to my writing, which is a bit strange to say because I still feel like I have substantial room for improvement. But that’s still a pretty good track record, so I’ll tell you what has worked for me:
Ask people to read your stuff and tell you at what point they get bored or want to stop. Tell them to be brutally honest. The most important part of writing is keeping your audience’s attention, and many writers make no effort to do this.
Write about something that’s actually important, and that interests you. I’ve done a large amount of high-quality writing about interest rates, banking and crypto. So far as I can tell it was a complete waste because no one cared. 80% of the battle is just picking the right topic.
Put the most imortant ideas at the start of whatever you’re writing. The drop-off among readers (even on a site like LessWrong) is shockingly high. I received almost 400 upvotes on my post about adult intelligence enhancement, and only four people sent me a DM in response to my request they do so that I placed at the end of the appendix.
Write the narrative of a story in the evening and then correct language and facts in the morning. My best, most productive narrative writing often occurs late at night, but when I re-read it in the morning it sounds sloppy and full of mistakes. However, I nearly always need to start with the sloppy, emotional version because good narrative writing is the one thing I can’t do well when my brain is functioning at full capacity.
Don’t be afraid to start a new draft of a post if you feel like you haven’t gotten the narrative right.
Who do you recommend asking to be a reader?
I have a extremely difficult time finding friends to earnestly read my material. The amount of times I’ve sent a PDF and heard… nothing. I guess it is at least partly because of your second suggestion—I write about topics that interest me but probably aren’t that important to anyone that isn’t me. I don’t know anyone who has any interest in the use of Pantomime in Cinema.
That means finding people to read and critique my writing is already an uphill battle, because unless I’m a “good writer” already how can I possibly convince them that this topic is interesting or important?
That’s a difficult question. I always tell readers that the number one thing I’m interested in is where they got bored and stopped reading. I ask them to be brutally honest and not feel like they need to keep reading to flatter my ego or because they are afraid of being harsh on me.
If they aren’t interested in the topic in the first place it’s harder. You need to be able to at least find an audience that is interested in sitting down to read it. Can you like join a hobbyist club for this stuff, or find a subreddit for it?
Here’s a kind of galaxy-brained idea that might just work for finding your crowd:
Go onto reddit and find the subreddit community closest to the thing you’re interested in/writing about
Go to https://subredditstats.com and enter the name of that subreddit to see which communities it has the most overlap with.
Go to meetup.com and see if you can find a local group dedicated to one of those related topics (or better yet, the topic itself)
Go to the meetup, pitch your thing, and see if people are into it. Maybe just TALK about what you’ve written first and if people seem interested offer to send them what you’ve written.
If you decide to actually give the above a shot, tell me how it goes. I’d be very interested to hear whether my idea works.
The first lecture at this link and accompanying handout from UChicago’s (now-retired) writing-program director, Larry McEnerney, has come up here on a number of occasions.
Additionally, I imagine you’ll be able to unearth some good stuff perusing LW’s writing tag.
Have AI text-to-speech read your work back to you. I catch a lot of tense mismatches and bad phrasings this way.
This advice isn’t specific to writing, but I believe it still applies. To get better at something, it’s very often necessary to stop worrying about the overall thing and try to get better at components and contributing skills.
For technical or idea-communicative pieces, you can explicitly work on sentence length, paragraph relevance (what are you actually communicating with each fragment?), the very hard skills of writing for diverse reader preferences, etc.
Also applicable to many domains, cultivate feedback avenues. Getting someone to tell you what they got out of a piece, and what felt like it interfered, is absolute gold. But somewhat difficult to find if you’re not part of communities where it’s common.
Really interesting! Thanks a lot for the reminder that working on the components of the end goal is important — it should be very obvious, yet it seems like it’s not often brought to our awareness, and I often see people, including myself, neglecting it
Edit your writing. If you have the self-awareness that your sentences are too long, edit them to be shorter.
Asking GPT-4 to critique your writing and dialog about ways to improve it is also useful.
Yes, I know, but I still need to practice: all the editing I do (including the editing that may not actually improve the text) means that it can take me a full day to write a couple of pages that end up not being great.
More broadly, I know practice can only be achieved by practicing more (duh), but I’d love a piece of advice that would make “practice more” more actionable, or help more directly with the root issues in my writing (the most obvious are that I’m anxious not to miss any potentially important detail, that I’m bad at deciding what is important, etc., but there surely are countless other issues I haven’t identified, and advice which would help me identify issues, or correct them, more effectively would be useful).
My point was that if you spent a lot of time practicing writing and no time practicing editing, you are likely not progressing as fast.
I gave you such advice. Ask ChatGPT to identify issues.
Good point, thanks! I read that too quickly as something more like “just edit more” than “writing without editing isn’t a good way to practice”, so I kind of misinterpreted it.
Just speculating here, but I suspect that becoming a good writer comes in two steps. First, you must get from actively bad to neutral. Second, you get from neutral to good.
I have no idea how to do the second part. I think I can advise you on the first, because although the great writers have their unique voices, the bad writers typically keep making the same mistakes. (Trying to do the second part before mastering the first part results in bad writing. You need to get rid of the bad habits first.) This is the first part:
Most importantly, write shortly and to the point. Text can be shortened on multiple levels: sentences contain extra words; articles contain extra sections. Does the meaning of the sentence change substantially if you skip this word? If not, skip it. Would the article still make its intended point without this section? If yes, remove it. (If it breaks your heart, maybe move it to a footnote, or decide to keep it for a follow-up article.)
An example of a section that can be removed is introduction. Instead of “in this article, I will tell you what X is”, simply start by describing X. (Generally, meta goes last, if at all.)
Use simple words rather than complicated ones, if the meaning is the same. Short sentences rather than long ones. Don’t make the text needlessly costly for the reader.
Group sentences to paragraphs (one thought per paragraph), and paragraphs to sections. Makes the text easier to navigate. (Too long text—insert pictures.)
In fiction, I would say: use sensory words. Describe what the characters see or hear or feel, not just their opinions or thoughts. In non-fiction, specific examples are better than abstractions (give examples first, generalize later), and illustrations can help.
Don’t try to impress. That usually backfires. Anything “artistic” or “high-status” probably just sucks, e.g. modern journalism.
If it is possible to explain to a child, do it that way. Your task is to transmit thoughts, not signal your sophistication. Impress by concepts, not by choice of words.
If you use equations, explain what the individual symbols mean. Even mathematicians may not necessarily be familiar with conventions in your branch of math.
(In the second part you go against some of this advice, e.g. you insert jokes even if they are not strictly necessary, you use complicated words as a kind of insider jokes, etc. But the difference is that you only do that on purpose and at the right place, not habitually.)
The advice I wish I had earlier is:
https://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/06/the_day_you_bec.html
read one of Derek Sivers’s books (as an example)
Derek Sivers also has some recommendations for some writing books that are probably good. I tried Several Short Sentences About Writing and idk it was okay for me, some people really like it though
I disagree with this definitively. I can’t read most if not almost all LW posts. You can do much better if you know what you want to communicate and only say the essential words.
That’s interesting. I find it relaxing to read most LW posts/comments, which tempts me to call them good writers. Perhaps it’s not that they write “well” but that they think similar to me?
I second GeneSmith’s suggestion to ask readers for feedback. Be aware that this is something of an imposition and that you’re asking people to spend time and energy critiquing what is currently not great writing. If possible, offer to trade—find some other people with similar problems and offer to critique their writing. For fiction, you can do this on CritiqueCircle but I don’t know of an organised equivalent for non-fiction.
The other thing you can do is to iterate. When you write something, say to yourself that you are writing the first draft of X. Then go away and do something else, come back to your writing later, and ask how you can edit it to make it better. You already described problems like using too many long sentences. So edit your work to remove them. If possible, aim to edit the day after writing—it helps if you can sleep on it. If you have time constraints, at least go away and get a cup of coffee or something in order to separate writing time from editing time.
For essays:
Write a short outline and then do lots of research.
Using the outline and your research have a long conversation about the topic with a person that you’re used to having long conversations with. If it helps you can record the conversation or take notes.
Write the essay the morning or night after the conversation. With essays I find it’s better to work in small bursts (20-60 minutes) and go back to it periodically but that may just be a personal preference.
Have someone read it.
Edit.
For narratives:
Write it either in bursts or one sitting and don’t think about it too much. You can do it by hand or typed but don’t be afraid to jump around, write in the margins or write footnotes to use later or articulate what you’re trying to say or effect you want to achieve without including in the actual narrative. Just keep going until you feel satisfied or feel like you’re not making progress.
Put it away and don’t look at it or think about it for a period of time (2 weeks to 6 months).
Reread and edit.
Have someone read it.
Edit.
As a professional novelist, the best advice I can give comes from one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, Ernest Hemingway: “The first draft of anything is shit.” He was known to rewrite his short stories up to 30 times. So, rewrite. It helps to let some time pass (at least a few days) before you reread and rewrite a text. This makes it easier to spot the weak parts.
For me, rewriting often means cutting things out that aren’t really necessary. That hurts, because I have put some effort into putting the words there in the first place. So I use a simple trick to overcome my reluctance: I don’t just delete the text, but cut it out and copy it into a seperate document for each novel, called “cutouts”. That way, I can always reverse my decision to cut things out or maybe reuse parts later, and I don’t have the feeling that the work is “lost”. Of course, I rarely reuse those cutouts.
I also agree with the other answers regarding reader feedback, short sentences, etc. All of this is part of the rewriting process.
Break them down. Long sentences in a comfortable cadence like being punctuated by short ones.
Give more regard to what the reader needs.
Have you asked readers whether they dislike the metaphors?
Rewrite after discovering your own intent. That’s what editing is for.
Fortunately your keyboard has an enter key, with no limit of uses.
Write where you feel that the stakes are low. If the consequences of poor proofreading don’t feel worth worrying about, you can practice the skill of worrying less.