Writing is hard. I used to think it wasn’t, but since I started college I think it is. Now writing on it’s own is not hard. It’s not much more than putting pen to paper, fingers to the keyboard. Writing well, however, is another story. But what does well mean exactly?

Here’s how I’d define it. A good piece of writing generally falls into one (or more) of these categories. It’s pretty hard to find something that falls into all three.

The first one is the hardest one, and that’s writing that is easy to understand. This is a surprisingly hard task. The reason for this is that schooling generally places a significant emphasis on structure, less on meaning. Many English classes spend a lot of time explaining the mechanics of good writing. There is definitely a place for this, and you can’t really write well without understanding some basic mechanics. But that is as far as I would take it. Where as in school you are taught to master sentence variation, clear writing tends to suffer when this is added. Shorter sentences are the best choice 95% of the time because you naturally do this when you communicate verbally. Most people pause a lot when they talk, and this helps because it separates ideas frequently. If there are too many ideas in one breath, you’d get lost. Same applies to writing.

The second thing that makes a piece of writing good is accurate word choice. Now here, I make sure to not use the word simple. Generally speaking, if there is a simpler word - you should use it. This is because there is rarely anything to gain for more complicated language. It’s even worse if the complicated language is not common. The last thing you want your reader doing is looking up what something in your piece means. But sometimes, there is just the right word for the task. And in these cases, you should use the word. That’s what I mean when I say accurate. Try to pick the best word for the job, without trying too hard to oversimplify your writing or make it sound more convoluted than it is.

The third thing that makes a piece of writing good is something that is a little hard to describe. But it’s writing that “flows” well. You can’t really say how to do this, but when it flows - you can tell. I think getting to this stage obviously requires you to write a lot, but also requires you to do something I think is unconventional. It requires you to read a lot of bad writing. [1] This is contradictory, because you might think you stand to gain more from reading good writing. After all, this is how most things work. If you want to learn how to draw well, you might not gain the most from watching some draw terribly. But the more good you want to be at something, the more value is presented from understanding the worse versions of that - particularly why it is is bad. And so this is where I see a lot of value in bad writing. It let’s you know what to watch it for, which is arguably more valuable then knowing what to do well. There is more good writing than bad writing, and so you only have to watch it for a few small things that become apparent after a while.

The final thing that I think really helps with writing better is this PG article, Write Like you Talk. It is a great read so I would encourage you to check it out on your own. My personal takeaways are that this is a hard thing mostly because writing lends itself to be more formal. But you really shouldn’t view this to be the case. This where the writing flow comes into play. You know something isn’t too formal when it sort of just flows well when you read it. And that can be accomplished through using the best words possible. and limiting your sentence structure to be as simple as possible.

So I guess the general advice is this: to use simple words, simple sentences, and try to come across as simple as possible as to flow well. Simple, right?

Notes