Morgan Housel: Writing Lessons for a Better Life

•Make your point and get out of people’s way

•Writing is one of those things you’ll need to be decent at no matter what business you’re in. It’s also one of the hardest things to get decent at, since it’s 90% art, 10% illogical grammar rules. Novelist William Maughan said there are three rules to good writing. “Unfortunately no one knows what they are.”

•The best writers tend to use the fewest words possible. That doesn’t mean their writing is short, but every sentence is critical, every word necessary. Elmore Leonard, the novelist, summed this up when he advised writers to “leave out the parts readers tend to skip.”

•It took me a while to realize that a reader who doesn’t finish what you wrote isn’t disrespecting your work. It’s a sign that you, the author, disrespected their time.

•Part of the reason this is hard is due to how writing is taught in school. Most writing assignments, from elementary to grad school, come with a minimum length requirement. Write about your summer vacation in at least 10 pages. This is done to maintain a minimum level of effort, but it has a bad side effect: It teaches people to fill the page with fluff. We are masters of run-on sentences and unnecessary details because we’ve relied on them since second grade to meet our length quotas.

•We’d all be better writers if the standards flipped, and teachers demanded length maximums. Write about all the major Civil War battles in no more than two pages. That’ll force you to make your point and get out of people’s way.

•Connect one field to others

•Connecting lessons from one field to another is also one of the best forms of thinking, because the real world isn’t segregated by academic departments. Most fields share at least some lessons and laws between them. Adaptation is as real in economics as it is biology. Room for error is as important in investing as it is engineering. Explaining one topic through the lens of another not only makes it easier for readers to grasp; it’s a helpful way of understanding things in general.

•

•Sleep on everything before hitting the send button

•I’m a fan of reading more books and fewer articles

•The reason books can be more insightful than articles isn’t because they’re longer. It’s because they took the author more time to think something through.

•An article that takes you a few hours to think of, research, write and publish is subject to whatever mood you’re in during those few hours. Maybe it’s cynical, or pessimistic. Or analytical, or fatalistic. Whatever it is, it might not reflect the calmer, thought-out view of something that took you days, weeks, or months to think about.

•“The first draft of anything is shit,” said Ernest Hemingway.

A lot of what we write isn’t time-sensitive. You could sleep on it for a day or two or more.

Source: http://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/writing-lessons-for-a-better-life/ 

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