How to Get Better at Writing
I recently made a YouTube video about how to get better at writing, and at least a few people seem to have liked it. I started this blog to get better at social media and marketing so that I could start my own “business” and be my own “boss” of my writing; I’d also like to help people who read it get better at writing, too.
It doesn’t matter if you want to get better at writing for the office, school, or if you like to do creative writing. Here’s what I recommend you do to get better at writing in the long run. This can get a little dense, so feel free to just watch the YouTube video if you want. But, if you really want to get better at writing–especially for your job–here’s what I recommend.
You Already Write
When I teach writing, the first thing I like to make a big deal about is this: you already write; you do it every day, all the time. You write when you text your family and friends, and you write when you send emails or text messages or communicate at work. If you went to school in the United States, you practiced reading and writing with certain teachers to accomplish certain things, like to prove your understanding of a topic or to communicate an idea you had.
Even if you didn’t stay in school for very long, your family taught you certain “literacy practices” to help you survive in the world; you can likely read fast food menus, talk on the phone if you need to, check your mail, and send text messages or Facebook messages to your friends and family to find out what they are up to or to get the okay to do something. There’s all sorts of scholarship around this now used in college settings—too many articles to list here.
Your Writing Has Purpose
When you text your family or send emails at work, you’re doing it for a certain reason or to accomplish a certain goal. In college, professors make students write papers to accomplish certain goals like to prove their competency of a topic, or to show some evidence of critical thinking. A lot of times, students who graduate college and get their first job in an office find that when they send emails and write other work-related things, they’re not getting the reactions they want; they’re so used to writing for professors—or a certain audience—that they don’t realize they need to write for a different audience at work.
Your Writing Has an Audience
When you catch yourself reading or writing, practice paying attention to why you’re doing those things. Are you reading the menu at McDonalds to figure out what they have to offer and what you want? Are you reading your receipt to find out what item put you over your budget? Are you writing an email to your supervisor to request the day off or to find out why your request was denied? Are you writing a daily or weekly summary or report of some kind for your department or team? Your audience has certain expectations. Practice learning what those expectations are. This is all basically “rhetoric,” and is a big part of writing scholarship in college writing courses. Look into rhetoric sometime if you really want to.
Read More
As you practice paying attention to audience and purpose, one of the things I recommend doing is reading more. I like to assign an anthology—a collection of texts—to my students, and I incorporate reading in my writing courses. When you read more you get ideas, and when you get ideas, you have something to write about.
I like using personal essay anthologies for this sort of thing. One I mentioned in my YouTube video is The Glorious American Essay, edited by Phillip Lopate. There are essays by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, plus essays by your more traditional writers that you’d read in a literature course like James Baldwin, Edgar Allan Poe, Jamaica Kincaid, and more.
Here’s affiliate link to the book on Amazon: note that if you click on the link, I may receive a commission on the sale from Amazon
But, you don’t have to use this book; you can use any anthology or book. I especially like using essays when I teach because essays like the ones in Lopate’s book show us that writing helps us think; sometimes essays can switch topics suddenly, or include contradictions. This is particularly true with “personal essays,” which are much more popular in literary circles now than they used to be. Phillip Lopate writes a really good introduction about personal essays in another anthology of his, The Art of the Personal Essay, and highlights the qualities of contradiction and thinking that personal essays can have. Writing to think is a great reason to write, especially after reading something. But don’t forget about audience and purpose when you do this; sometimes your audience is yourself and your purpose is to think through ideas.
If you like to use writing to help you think, one popular writing strategy that works well with that is freewriting.
Try Freewriting
Freewriting was a technique popularized by Peter Elbow in the 70s. He has a book called Writing without Teachers. Though he didn’t invent freewriting, his book was an introduction to the concept for a lot of people.
Freewriting is just writing without stopping. You don’t worry about grammar or typos, you just write what you are thinking. I recommend trying this for 10 minutes. Sometimes people recommend starting with a shorter length of time, and you can if you want, but one of the things you’ll need to do to get better at writing is to push yourself to write–and read–longer work. So, I say take 10 minutes to write out your thoughts on something–especially if you have questions after reading a book, an essay, a show, a YouTube video, a blog post, or whatever content you like to consume.
If you’re interested in freewriting, I can write and make more videos about it, so let me know in the comments. I’m still figuring out what kind of content about writing people actually want or find useful. You can also read Peter Elbow’s Writing without Teachers. He talks a lot about freewriting, about how we make meaning when we write, and lots of other interesting things. It was published in 1973, so there’s some outdated technology talk (typewriters, .etc) but it still holds up quite well.
Here’s an affiliate link to buy the book on Amazon if you’re interested. If you use this link, I may earn a commission on the sale from Amazon: https://amzn.to/49S47a3.
These are just the basics that I recommend starting with. Of course, if there’s a specific genre or type of writing you want to do, look for more writing like it and focus on that in your writing time. You do have to get better at writing over time; college students have 4 years to get used to learning all the different expectations of their different disciplines and audiences.
If you end up getting the books, let me know what you think about them, and let me know if you want more blogs about getting better at writing. There are all sorts of things we could talk about, like writing effectively with AI, grammar and language diversity, and all sorts of other things. You can also ask me questions or recommend topics and we can go from there!
