Write Better Now

By Serif Press

You can learn to write well.

But maybe you’ve been doing it wrong so far.

If you find it hard to put your thoughts in writing, you need a new approach to the problem.

What’s the one question you should never ask yourself when you sit down to write? What are the warning signs that your writing is going wrong? How do you get started when you can’t get past the blank screen? These are the secrets you won’t find anywhere else.

This isn’t a book of grammar or punctuation. It’s not here to teach you correct style. There are plenty of books for that.

This book is here to help you change the way you think about writing. It’s a little book—you can read it in an afternoon. But it could make your writing easier and better for the rest of your life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Serif Press
• Release date: Oct 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311342959

Book preview

Write Better Now

by Christopher Bailey

Copyright 2014 by Christopher Bailey

Preface

If you’re writing a book, you should know what publishers have long since figured out: nobody reads prefaces or introductions. Everybody skips to the thing that says Chapter 1.

That’s your readers telling you they don’t really need prefaces or introductions, and this little book is all about learning to give your readers what they want.

So never put anything important in a preface or introduction. Use the preface to thank your great-aunt for leaving you her Hupmobile, and the introduction for ramblings about the meaning of life and art. Or just leave them both out and start with Chapter 1.

See? You’re a better writer already.

Chapter 1: The One Question You Should Never Ask

How can I say that?

When you sit down to write, it’s probably the first question you ask yourself. And it leads you down the wrong path right away.

Think about it for a moment. You’ve been using language since you were about a year old. You’ve had quite a long time to practice. You know how to say stuff.

If you were telling your friend across the hall how to use the coffee machine, you’d know exactly what you wanted to say.

If you were telling the story of how you dropped your phone into the sewer grate and had to get a new one, everyone would understand you without any trouble.

So what is this strange thing that happens to us when we sit down at a keyboard or pick up a pen? Why do we suddenly feel as though we have to think about every word? Why do we ask ourselves, "How can I say that?"

Maybe it has something to do with the way we learn in school—we talk to our friends, but we write for teachers who grade us. Or maybe it’s just that writing happens so much slower than talking—it gives us time to think and second-guess ourselves.

Whatever causes it, this habit is the biggest hurdle between you and good writing. Instead of thinking about what your reader wants to know, you’ve started thinking about what your reader thinks of you.

Your writing shouldn’t get dressed up in its Sunday best to go out into the everyday world. It should say what you mean, not what you think will impress people.

When you’re a very good writer, you can take the time to weigh every word and polish each phrase to a high gloss. But if you’re just working on becoming a good writer, you need to concentrate on writing the way you speak.

That doesn’t mean everything you say comes out perfectly. It doesn’t mean that your writing will be flawless if you just learn to write the way you talk.

But it does mean that the quickest and easiest way to improve your writing is to stop thinking so much about how you can say that.

That’s true no matter what kind of writing you’re doing.

Suppose you’re a technical writer putting together an instruction manual. If an expert is giving you information to put in written form, you’re likely to get a lucid explanation, followed by the baffled question, "How can we say that?"

The answer is almost always the same: You just did.

Of course, you might put your job in jeopardy by giving a straight answer like that. Why do we need writers at all, the management might ask, if our engineers already know how to say everything?

But you and I know that the engineers wouldn’t write down what they say. They’d ask themselves, "How can we say that?" Then they’d write long strings of impressive-looking words, piling one fat noun on top of another until no one could figure out what they were talking about. Like this:

PHONE DATE/TIME DISPLAYS RESET

This was the title of a memo from the IT department of a certain company whose name doesn’t need to be dragged through the mud. What does it mean? Is it telling us that the date and time have been reset on all the telephones? Is it giving us instructions for what to do when we see the word RESET displayed where we would normally see the date and time?

Neither. After reading the memo, we discover that it’s telling us how to reset the date and time on our phones.

So that’s what the title should have been:

HOW TO RESET THE DATE AND TIME ON YOUR PHONE

It’s longer, but it actually takes much less time to read, because we know what it means the first time we glance at it.

You can see what happened here. We change to daylight time this weekend, somebody’s boss said. Send out a memo telling people how to reset the time and date on their phones. And the loyal memo-writer went back to his desk, sat down in front of the keyboard, and asked himself, "How can I say that?" It probably took ten minutes of really hard thinking to come up with a much worse substitute for the words his boss had already given him.

When somebody