Comment by clolege | Hacker News Reader

Comment by clolege | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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...

> 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.

Nice tips and resources thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com