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Comment by byteflip | Hacker News Reader

I’ve always been quite mediocre at reading and writing. This has been confirmed by my grades over the years.

Just this week, I’ve been writing a script for a YouTube video and it is difficult for me. Organizing my thoughts and making it “seamless” is a lot of work. In my software job I usually default to bullet points for technical writing — which I feel is a cop out. I had decided before reading this article that I want to invest some time in these neglected skills.

Does anyone have any recommendations for improving these skills?

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I've also been trying to improve my writing recently. What's helped me was to read through a couple of resources on how to write better [0,1,2], and then:

1. Apply the better writing advice to my everyday speech

2. Focus on writing down exactly what I wanted to say, and how I would have said it

School taught me to be super wordy and focus overly on the editing stage. Nowadays, I read everything I write out loud and if it sounds awkward (or not like me) then I just delete it and write it again from scratch. Oftentimes it helps to just close my eyes, say what I want to out loud, then write down what I just said.

It can turn out to be a little bit wordier, but it almost always ends up being easier to read :)

[0] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31060362 [2] https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Well-Classic-Guide-Nonfiction...

Nice tips and resources thanks!

> Nowadays, I read everything I write out loud and if it sounds awkward (or not like me) then I just delete it and write it again from scratch. Oftentimes it helps to just close my eyes, say what I want to out loud, then write down what I just said.

This does sound like editing to me (in a good way). Unless you meant something else when you wrote that school taught you to focus overtly on the editing stage.

Now that you mention it, my old style of editing might have been something that I learned, rather than was explicitly taught.

I used to frame writing as a painful activity, so once I had a "workable" rough draft, I would break out a scalpel and try to make it readable with word surgery. I would spend hours staring at the same few paragraphs, and it was horrible.

Now I just delete it. It feels like a clean slate, but the slate in my brain has made opinions about what's important to say and how to say it better.

The two approaches exercise completely different muscles, and what I like about the "rewrite" approach is that it exercises some of the same muscles that will help me communicate myself properly on the first try.

Let go of the fear. Everyone has tens of thousands of bad words in them that need to be written down before the good words start coming out.

Practice wise, write about the same thing several times. Write. Then reflect for a week or a month. Then write again. Then do it 3 months later. You will see a clear improvement.

And of course, teachers are invaluable. See if you can take an evening class somewhere, or if you have money hire a tutor - you can pay a grad student at your local university.

Practice? Using bullet points as a first step to make a draft of the overall structure seems like it could be helpful.

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