•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/
