what I do for work…

how to get better at writing…

With my background and education in creative writing and business, I get a lot of questions about how to get better at writing. This is what I write a lot about on my own blog. Sometimes people mean creative writing (fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, drama, etc.) but many times people just mean writing in general. Of course, there are entire college courses on these subjects, and I even teach some of them. If you want to get better at writing, these are the things I recommend doing:

• First, you should try to understand that you already write. Whether it’s emails at work, text messages to your family, presentations for your boss, or something else, you do things that require you to communicate to other people for a purpose of some kind, or to accomplish some goal.

• You should increase your genre awareness. Want to write better emails that accomplish things in your particular field? Read more emails. Learn to identify emails and their conventions; what works well and what doesn’t? Want to write fiction, read more fiction. If you want to get better at multiple genres, read/watch those genres. I also recommend reading personal essays because they can be interesting to read and can give you ideas and questions to think about. Reading is a key here; reading and writing are interconnected.

• Write to answer questions you have about what you read. Don’t worry about grammar or punctuation. Write to help yourself think through things.

• Try reading longer texts or different kinds of texts than you are used to. Over time, this helps increase your reading stamina. You may find this difficult at times and even come across texts that you just don’t understand; that’s normal. Put it away and try something else, then come back to the harder ones a little later.

• Don’t worry too much about grammar, focus on clarity and expressing yourself the way you want to come across to others, depending on the purpose of the writing.

• Keep doing it. Writing better in any particular genre takes time and practice. I have a blog post here that goes more in depth about what I recommend doing to get better at writing.

what’s the difference between learning business writing and creative writing?

• This can be difficult to answer, but if a student asks me this, I say that generally business writing is a genre of writing with conventions to help accomplish business goals, whereas creative writing is about expressing yourself and ideas.

• If you’re in college, English 101 is, well… English 101. It’s often a prerequisite for creative writing courses and business and technical writing courses, so the things you would learn in English 101 (such as genre awareness, rhetoric, .etc.) are all useful to understand when you start to tackle more serious creative writing or writing in a business setting. Either way, I would stress audience and genre awareness and getting better at reading before I stressed things like grammar.

why should I learn more about writing when I can just use AI?

• Using AI to aid your writing is okay. I know people will have different opinions about this, but from my perspective as an adjunct professor, there’s not much I can do about students using AI. I know they use it. If you’re a business owner or a manager, you might also use it a lot, especially for repetitive writing. Even coordinators and IT professionals use it. What’s important is that when you use it, you pay attention to audience and purpose. Having an idea of what good writing in a certain genre is can be helpful as you tweak AI output. AI is also great for generating ideas that you can run with.

• You need to learn the conventions of citing AI work; misleading others isn’t a good idea. AI often borrows heavily from open-web writing or other sources, meaning that if you’re not careful, you could be plagiarizing others’ work.

• For creative writing, I generally recommend not using AI that much because the goal of creative writing for me is to express myself and play with characters and language; I actually enjoy it. It all goes back to audience and purpose. For literary work, the audience expects the work to be my own, and its purpose is for my own creativity and for my reader’s enjoyment. For business writing or more technical writing, that may not be the case. For academic writing, you want to prove your competency and thought process on a subject or idea, so while using AI as a tool to help you brainstorm or outline can be effective, I recommend not relying on AI completely.