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What to read to become a better writer
- kwijibob 4y agoI clicked with interest. Ugly cookie popup was the first thing I read. Then some big ads at the top and sides begged for my attention. Next was the paywall box selling me some complicated subscription deal. Dreaming of a world wide web that cherishes writing.
- cocacola1 4y agoWithout the paywall: https://archive.ph/20220925200441/https://www.economist.com/the-economist-reads/2022/09/09/what-to-read-to-become-a-better-writer https://archive.ph/20220925200441/https://www.economist.com/...
- TeacherTortoise 4y agohttps://archive.ph/38AGY https://archive.ph/38AGY
- b215826 4y agoYou can get rid of Economist's paywall by disabling JS.
- BizarroLand 4y agoOr in Firefox with the bypass paywalls extension.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zeroonetwothree 4y agoThis isn’t very interesting, these are all well known books you can find listed elsewhere. I was hoping for something original.
- ayewo 4y agoAt the end of the article, they link to their online writing course that costs £1,475 so this is more of an ad than an attempt at originality. https://education.economist.com/courses/professionalcommunication https://education.economist.com/courses/professionalcommunic...
- ohiovr 4y agoI found recording a read aloud of what I write helps me condense writing flow.
- ayewo 4y agoEven better is to listen to how your words flow using a Text-to-Speech (TTS) tool. I got this tip on HN. I use it a lot for long articles that I've already spent far too much time editing to help me catch sentences that could be broken up for clarity.
- waboremo 4y agoThis is an amazing tip! I use TTS quite a lot for checking certain accessibility issues, never once thought to use it for my own writing.
- ivansavz 4y ago+1 about this. It has been very helpful for my work. Here are instructions for how to set this up for macOS users: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem8qpMmnaBFYOgV32gdMc/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mApa60zJA8rgEm6T6GF0yIem...
- weekendvampire 4y ago100%. After I'm done with my last draft I always read the whole thing loudly, and end up changing at least a word or two in every paragraph. Usually it's the small stuff - eg. using "he instead went" instead of "instead he went" because my brain expects a sentence a certain way that "flows" well and I've written something else.
- jamiek88 4y agoI’ve developed that further to getting Siri to read it out to me.
- sverona 4y agoVernacular Eloquence by Peter Elbow is my go-to.
- GavinMcG 4y agoJust read that after seeing your suggestion. It's good! Skipped a lot of the argumentation—the proof is in the pudding, after all—and appreciated the concrete advice about "resources of speech" and intonational units.
- koheripbal 4y agoI have found re-reading my own writing helps tremendously. We often do not appreciate how vague we are and how many biases we embed in our writing until we read them again outside of our current mindset. This is why portant emails should be composed, and then wait until later before re-reading. You will often find yourself rewriting entire communications because your original message was unclear/emotional/combative/etc...
- blockwriter 4y agoI've been doing an exhaustive review of my diaries from the last 6 odd years. I am amazed by how many sentences start with one idea, lapse in the middle, and conclude almost as if another person had taken over. Evidently, some thought had transpired in that interval, but I failed to transcribe it to the page.
- eatonphil 4y ago> portant emails portant?
- exac 4y agoThe point is that re-reading catches errors, like the spelling of "important".
- tomrod 4y ago> This is why portant emails should be composed, and then wait until later before re-reading. Not sure if intentional, but if so this was a fantastic way to emphasize your point!
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- ohiovr 4y agoI wish I followed that advice awhile ago.
- sowbug 4y ago
- eatonphil 4y agoThe books that (I think) made the biggest impact on my writing are Zinsser's On Writing Well, everything Hemingway (e.g. The Sun Also Rises, A Moveable Feast), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Wind, Sand and Stars, and Beryl Markham's West with the Night. The common theme being simplicity and informal, but correct, speech.
- snitzr 4y agoHow to Write, Speak and Think More Effectively by Rudolph Flesch is still a great book and good bang for your buck. I got mine on bookfinder.com
- trenning 4y agoTwo books which I read this year that have helped me become a better writer are, Charles Bukowski On Writing Kurt Vonnegut Letters These books aren’t so much about how to write better but more so a look into the minds of two good authors. Helped me get over some of the hurdles of writing. Probably not very useful if you’re looking to be an improved work document writer but for creative writing they were great.
- luuuzeta 4y agoAnother one is Stephen King's On Writing.
- bigmattystyles 4y agoAdd Orwell’s essay on the English language. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
- dnc 4y agoAn essay on writing by Raymond Carver [1] (as well as pretty much anything by Raymond Carver and authors he mentions in the essay :)). It's about good fiction writing, but, I think, good to keep in mind for writing in general. [1] https://bryanafern.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/on-writing-raymond-carver.pdf https://bryanafern.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/on-writing-ra...
- notjulianjaynes 4y agoNo discussion of Carver is complete without mentioning his relationship with editor Gordon Lish. >Carver had been up all night reviewing Lish’s severe editorial cuts––two stories had been slashed by nearly seventy per cent, many by almost half; many descriptions and digressions were gone; endings had been truncated or rewritten––and he was unnerved to the point of desperation. https://web.archive.org/web/20220617140639/http://www.newyorker.com:80/magazine/2007/12/24/rough-crossings https://web.archive.org/web/20220617140639/http://www.newyor...
- montefischer 4y agoFrom Schopenhauer's essay, "On reading and books": > No literary quality can be attained by reading writers who possess it: be it, for example, persuasiveness, imagination, the gift of drawing comparisons, boldness or bitterness, brevity or grace, facility of expression or wit, unexpected contrasts, a laconic manner, naïveté, and the like. But if we are already gifted with these qualities—that is to say, if we possess them potentia—we can call them forth and bring them to consciousness; we can discern to what uses they are to be put; we can be strengthened in our inclination, nay, may have courage, to use them; we can judge by examples the effect of their application and so learn the correct use of them; and it is only after we have accomplished all this that we actu possess these qualities. This is the only way in which reading can form writing, since it teaches us the use to which we can put our own natural gifts; and in order to do this it must be taken for granted that these qualities are in us. Without them we learn nothing from reading but cold, dead mannerisms, and we become mere imitators. Gutenberg link: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11945/11945-h/11945-h.htm#link2H_4_0007 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11945/11945-h/11945-h.htm#li...
- mjw1007 4y agoDid Schopenhauer go on to give any reasons to believe that the things he was claiming there are true?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- xboxnolifes 4y agoI dislike this view, for learning to write or anything else. It has an implicit assertion that all human quality is innate, and we only ever learn how to recognize and express it. This means that we can never actually learn anything new, we can only learn new ways to pull from our innate quality, and everything else is just imitation. It implies we are born with some sort of immutable value locked inside of us, which I disagree with.
- rizzom5000 4y agoI read it more like the word 'attain' means to internalize those writing abilities are your own; and reading others will not work to achieve developing such an ability. As such, this advice is about the same as most advice I've seen from great writers - read a lot, but write more.
- pdm55 4y agoWalter Mosley made an interesting observation about the writing process. When he rereads his first draft of a novel, he notes the places where the words go awry: where something is amiss; where a character seems shallow, poorly developed. (I'm just recalling this from memory.) Mosely simply notes those spots in the novel. And keeps reading. Right to the end. He says he finds that when he fixes those sections, that's when the writing starts to sparkle. The book I read was Mosley, "This is the Year You Write Your Novel". I guess his message is to not be aggrieved when one’s writing seems like sh*t. That observation might be the start of a good piece of writing. Alternatively there's the quip of Oscar Wilde: “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”
- skilled 4y agoThere's no such thing as better writer. You either have passion and then use inspiration to fuel that passion or you don't. Not everyone is privileged to have higher-education or have the ability to learn the entire Oxford dictionary. I've worked with editors at Fast Company, Entrepreneur, TheNextWeb and others, and I have not _ever_ tried to read a book to make myself a better writer. What does that even mean? And on numerous occasions I have gotten away with submitting first drafts that get published "as is" without anyone telling me otherwise. Am I some omnipotent writer, or were the editors incompetent? I doubt it. I think what a lot of people also don't understand about writing is that some of the best work out there (articles, books, etc.), for the person who put it out - it can be compared to having participated in a triathlon because it has THAT immense of an effect on your mental state of being. Want to be a better writer? Find out what your passion is and write about that. No book and no order of semicolons is going to make you "better" unless what you write about is what lights the fire underneath your feet.
- GavinMcG 4y ago> Not everyone is privileged to have higher-education or have the ability to learn the entire Oxford dictionary. That you bring up education and vocabulary suggests that you do think there's such a thing as better writers. One obvious example: compare a given three-year-old to you. You are almost certainly a better writer. Compare you at three years old to today. Same story. Sure, you may be right that passion is required. But why dismiss skill?
- skilled 4y agoExactly, I am talking about skill and the use of words as a means to add flare to a story, but it does not make you better. Just because you can translate a black and white story (which conveys the message/lesson) using all the colors of a rainbow does not make you better.
- GavinMcG 4y agoDo you mean "flair"? You're right that people can disagree about what to value, but I'd think that given a set of values, maximizing them is better than not. If you're a writer who does care about using all the colors of a rainbow, doesn't learning how to use indigo and orange make you better than when you only knew black, white, red, and green?
- awinter-py 4y agowhat to write to become a better writer
- geocrasher 4y agoStephen King, On Writing. No matter what your writing style is or what your subject matter is, be it fiction or not, this book will turn any writer into a better writer. Note that I didn't say it'll turn any writer into a good writer. It'll turn them into a better one. A good writer could become great and a terrible writer can become slightly less terrible. It's all subjective. One thing I've learned is that some people have a way with words and some just don't. And there's nothing wrong with that. But all of us need to write at some point and that book will definitely help because it helps the person focus on what's most important to the story rather than what's the most important to the writer.
- notart666 4y agoThat's not how that works. Writing is about practice, repetition and feedback. Improvement is gradual and lifelong to say that only certain kinds of people get better is a pretty bad take. Anyone can become competent at writing. It's just many do not have the prerequisite requirements to begin improving on certain parts and never learn of their deficencies or how to fix them.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- queuebert 4y agoThat is a pretty low effort list. I have read dozens and dozens of books on writing, and for non-fiction nothing beats Writing with Style by Trimble.
- chiefalchemist 4y agoI've read the Pinker book. There were some useful takeaways. However, in general I found it long winded which is ironic as most writing tips include a recommendation of brevity. Read it if you feel you must, but lower your expectations.
- harrylove 4y ago[insert Sean Bean “One does not simply read to become…” meme] I don’t make a living as a writer but writing has made my living. Here’s my advice to improve as a writer in general, not as a writer of a specific genre or purpose, and not to improve a specific piece of writing. 0. All advice needs salt. 1. Recognize that all writing is personal and all reading is subjective. No one has a perfect lens. Be willing to be wrong. Even if you’re right, guaranteed someone else thinks you’re wrong. 2. Are you writing to be authentic or writing to be popular? Writing to persuade or to inspire? To amuse or confront? All of those may be in conflict at times. Recognize and accept the conflict, then make your choices in peace. See rule #1. 3. Everyone loves simple language. 4. But try not to be bland. This is the value of rhythm, voice, word choice, tropes and schemes, idioms, patterns, and so on. 5. There really is something to copying other people’s writing as a way of finding your own writing voice. So you need to read widely to find people worth copying. In general, avoid the angry advice writers. 6. Practice. Click the Publish button once in a while. You don’t end up pitching for the Yankees by reading about baseball. 7. Writing is pretty fantastic, isn’t it? 8. Language evolves. Just like foxes and toaster ovens. Accept it. Thank people for their critique of your apparent misuse of language and then please continue challenging the rules. 9. 10. Leave something to the imagination. Think of it like an offering to the gods. 11. No one cares about your writing as much as you do. See rule #1.
- stanislavb 4y agoThank you!
- adamisom 4y agoDamn good writing.
- darkteflon 4y agoSuperb.
- roland35 4y agoWhat's rule #9?!? I need to know!
- 4y ago
- mattbee 4y agoMy recommendation is First You Write a Sentence. by Joe Moran. It feels like a recent classic and I re-read chapters all the time.
- freddyym 4y agoOrwell's Politics and the English Language is a masterful essay. Forget that he gets his own rules wrong when setting them (twice) - but it rarely fails. It also happens to be the basis for the Economist's style guide...
- cocacola1 4y agoWithout the paywall: https://archive.ph/20220925200441/https://www.economist.com/the-economist-reads/2022/09/09/what-to-read-to-become-a-better-writer https://archive.ph/20220925200441/https://www.economist.com/...
- hamiltonians 4y agoWriting advice is overrated. it's hard to know what readers will like. a lot of randomness involved. also, you need to build rapport or trust with the audience or reader, which is hard.
- ohiovr 4y agoIf you are pitching a far off idea it is good that when you read aloud the text you consider it from the perspective of the right measure of skepticism so that you can address the plain issues quickly and maybe contrast the alternatives that failed for similar reasons.
- cratermoon 4y agoThe article recommends having a good dictionary at hand, and that is absolutely correct advice. What I'd like to suggest is that, aside from writing that absolutely must use terms from the last 100 years, use the Webster 1913[1] as your dictionary of choice. It's become a fetish, of sorts, among writers like Cory Doctorow [2] and others who approvingly link to James Somers' May 18, 2014 post, "http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary"[3] http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary"[3]. Try it. Read its [1] https://www.websters1913.com/ https://www.websters1913.com/ [2] https://boingboing.net/2014/05/29/you-should-try-the-1913-webste.html https://boingboing.net/2014/05/29/you-should-try-the-1913-we... [3] http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary http://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary
- robertlf 4y agoWhat's the point of linking to an article behind a paywall that all of us probably can't read?
- teleforce 4y agoCheck out this old but gold Reader's Digest: How to Write and Speak Better[1]. [1]https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2180265.Reader_s_Digest https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2180265.Reader_s_Digest
- reij0 4y agoThere is one such book on how to write, absolutely the best in every way and recommended by the most eminent writers in the world. You can get it from any stationery store, and it only contains blank pages.