writing to communicate

A few weeks ago, I got the best piece of writing advice I’ve heard in a long time:

“You’re not writing to impress, you’re writing to communicate.”

It was an off-hand comment made by one of my professors to my class about the way we should be writing our assignment. I don’t think it occured to anybody else how brilliant a thing it was to say; but evidently, I thought it was a great piece of advice and it has stuck with me. (As have alot of things this particular professor has taught me over the past year.)

It seems like such an obvious thing to say, “you’re writing to communicate.”

Well, duh.

But i’ve found that so many people my age have ingrained in their minds that they have to write a certain way - To use a certain tone and scholarly words and follow certain formats in order to sound smart. But if it’s at the expense of the clairty of your message- what’s the point? Who cares how smart you sound if nobody has any idea what you’re talking about?

Personally, whenever I’m writing something I aim to be as straightforward and concise as possible. 

It’s a big part of why I love this exchange that happens in lectures:

Student: How long does this paper have to be?

Professor: As long as it needs to be.

My thinking is, unless someone is reading your work for pleasure, you don’t want to drown them in literary cliches thinking it will impress them into thinking what you’ve written is worth reading.  There’s a huge difference in the language used to write something for clairty, or technical writing and writing something for artistic expression, or more creative writing.  And too few people make this distinction.  I’m sure everybody has had experiences with these people.  People who make their writing so overly-fancy-sounding thinking it’s impressive, when in reality the reader is tilting their head and needs a second opinion to figure out exactly what they’re reading, feel free to share. I would, in fact I have a great example, but that’s enough out of me.

So, something to keep in mind or disregard:

You’re not writing to impress. You’re writing to communicate.

the awkward first post

Hello World,

I have no idea what to talk about, which isn’t exactly a great set-up to encourage you to keep reading, but really, what constitutes first-post material?  What did you write about? I feel like there should be some sort of introduction thing involved in this, but most people who read this know where i’m coming from anyway.  And for those who don’t, they’ll find out as I write more. 

 I’ve used livejournal for the past year or so, but I always treated it as more of a blog than a “journal” per-se because I don’t think posting deepdarksecrets on the internet is a good idea.  Even if you make it private or friends only.  The people who you allow to read your privatedeepdarksecrets should be people you’d talk to about your problems anyway.  It just complicates things.  So this was a big motivation in moving to wordpress.   Also, my friend Sean Henri has a glorious blog and I want to be just like him when I grow up.  So does Holly Patrick.

 I think that’s all for now.  More to come over the next few days as I get used to the in’s and out’s of this newfangled wordpress contraption.