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
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