Category Archives: Writing

Kind of a neat approach — visualize the book review you want to read before writing your book:

Many years ago, David Allen shared with me that one of the first things he did when planning his first book, the best-selling, Getting Things Done, was to write the Wall Street Journal review of his book, first. He wrote the book review as he would like it to appear in print, even before writing the first chapters of his book.

Derek Scruggs adds:

An acquaintance of mine, a direct marketing guru, once told me that he writes the sales letter before he ever creates the product. Only after he’s explained exactly what you’ll get and why you need it does he set about creating the product. (And sometimes, if the sales letter isn’t compelling enough, he just abandons the product altogether, saving him a lot of time and effort.)

The GTD blog also has the helpful reminder that if you don’t know what "done" looks like before starting a task, you won’t know when you are done.

Even when I think it’s unimportant….Even when I know I shouldn’t judge….I always end up focusing on a person’s choice of words and use of language in general.

Sometimes I read an essay where a person uses an interesting and pitch-perfect word, and then I see it show up again a few paragraphs later and it’s a let down. Or I have two oral conversations with someone and very quickly pick up on a favorite word or construction. Examples. One friend loves to talk about "policy cleavages" in politics, another uses the word "dynamic" as an all-purpose noun to describe almost anything, another uses "amusing" as his choice humor superlative. Nothing wrong with this — I just neurotically focus on it. I have my own go-to phrases and words such as the construction "so as to…".

Bryan Caplan today challenges conventional writing advice which says avoid the over-used phrases "of course" and "obviously." If it’s obvious, the advice goes, why do you need to say it?!

Why is it so hard to surrender these words?  The main reasons: When you say "obviously," or "of course"…

1. …listeners know not to waste time looking for a complicated rationale behind your statement. What they see is what they get.

2. …listeners can identify your starting points. It may be obvious that X is true, and obvious that X–>Y, but if you just start with Y, people will be confused.

3. …listeners find out what you take for granted.  If it’s different from what they take for granted, that’s news.

This is something I’ve thought about and notice very consciously when reading. In general, I dislike the phrases. I believe reason #3 above can be used condescendingly. People couch what is not an obvious point with the phrase "obviously" to indicate higher intelligence. Or people drop "of course" left and right because of their own intellectual insecurity — they don’t know what’s obvious or not, so they insist that all is obvious to them. Of course, hard and fast rules about writing should never be followed, and obviously there’s a time and place for everything.

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I feel less passionately than some about the semi-colon. I only know one proper way to use it (there are other ways). E.g.: "I wasn’t sure if I was going to like the book; however, I read it anyway because Joe recommended it." Semi-colon followed by "however" or some other transitional phrase. Otherwise, I never use semi-colons. Here’s Michael Kinsley from a long piece on semi-colons:

“The most common abuse of the semicolon, at least in journalism,” explains Kinsley, “is to imply a relationship between two statements without having to make clear what that relationship is. I suppose there are worse crimes in the world. (I don’t know if Osama bin Laden uses semicolons or not.) But Fred did have it right.”

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All this talk about phrases and semicolons distracts from a more pressing point: the world would be a much better place if a majority of people correctly used "it’s" and "its."

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I’m far from a perfect writer or grammar-follower. Part of why I blog about this stuff is being public about it forces me to a high standard, and also invites readers to point out corrections in my prose.

Some people are born to lift heavy weights, some are born to juggle with golden balls, says Joseph Epstein:

The golden jugglers are the ones with wit, the ability to pierce pretension, and the calm detachment to mock large ideas and salvationist schemes. They eschew anger and love small perfections. They go in for handsome gestures…have wide sympathies, and understand that a complex point of view is worth more than any number of opinions.

That’s from Epstein’s latest essay collection called In a Cardboard Belt! via a Claremont Review of Books review. The late Bill Buckley called Epstein the wittiest writer alive.

Other Epstein nuggets found in the review:

• “Charm is the desire to delight, light-handedly executed.”
• “Writing cannot be taught, but it can be learned.”
• On how to act now that he’s 70 years old: “If the game is to be played decently at seventy, one must hark back as little as possible to the (inevitably golden) days of one’s youth, no matter how truly golden they seem…Start talking about thenadays and one soon finds one’s intellectual motor has shifted into full crank, with everything about nowadays dreary, third rate, and decline and fallish. A big mistake. The reason old people think the world is going to hell, Santayana says, is because they believe that, without them in it, which will soon enough be the case, how good really can it be?”

One way blogging makes you a better writer is it forces you to work hard for your readers’ attention. On the web, it takes less than a second to close the page or click a new link. Your readers are busy and distracted.

This means you must engage the reader out of the gate and take nothing for granted. If you start sucking in the second paragraph, you’ll likely lose the reader’s attention.

Contrast this to school. In a writing class I’m taking this semester, everybody writes essays and turns them in to the class to be workshopped. Our homework is to read each others’ essays. As a writer, you know your classmates and professor are going to read your writing — no matter what. It’s their job. In a recent workshop, I was thinking to myself, “This is good for what it is, but I would never read this in my free time.” I’m sure professors across other disciplines, like History or Philosophy, think this all the time. School, then, might breed a bad habit for aspiring writers and thinkers: the illusion that people will always read your entire essay just because it’s you.

The so-called real world is super competitive. Nobody will read your stuff (well, other than your mom) just because it’s you. The real-world reality is: No one cares what you think. It’s up to you make people give a shit.

The blogosphere, with its tens of millions of competing blogs just a link a way, captures this brutal “life” reality perfectly. Nobody cares what you did yesterday. Nobody is reading your archives. Nobody is reading your bio. Show me something today.