Lifehack: When you write, you constantly feel the pressure of mastering the art of using commas. You are required to understand the difference between a colon and a semi one, the misplaced modifier, and the rules on splitting the infinitive. Really, who has a brain to for that? Not me, for sure. Do we really need to go back to school and learn grammar and punctuation all over again? Do we really need to take writing classes to understand the basics of forming intelligent sentences? No and no. You need to do these things but you don’t necessarily have to go back to a classroom setting.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
The 7 Golden Rules for Writing and Editing
Lifehack: When you write, you constantly feel the pressure of mastering the art of using commas. You are required to understand the difference between a colon and a semi one, the misplaced modifier, and the rules on splitting the infinitive. Really, who has a brain to for that? Not me, for sure. Do we really need to go back to school and learn grammar and punctuation all over again? Do we really need to take writing classes to understand the basics of forming intelligent sentences? No and no. You need to do these things but you don’t necessarily have to go back to a classroom setting.
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3 comments:
I like that this article follows the guidelines that it suggests. Particularly when emailing people who receive a lot of emails, you need to pay attention to how an email skims.
Being concise is important if you want the recipient to actually read it the first time, and clearly separating ideas with carriage returns makes it less likely that the recipient will miss something when skimming.
Reading aloud and the guidelines for editing are also helpful, and the bits about leaving out jargon and being brief (brevity is the soul of wit) if adopted in all emails would make the world a simpler place.
This is the kind of information that would actually be useful to teach in an Interp type class. Everyone needs to know this. Especially in a time when you're sometimes shooting out multiple important emails in a day to different people, a clear writing style is vital. Not only in the online world is this important, however. These steps, particularly the first, would be relevant to even more important applications like writing proposals. It's important to hook your reader in as soon as possible, since readers today are so likely to overlook lengthy looking bodies of text. It is equally important for proposals to be specific, as Step 3 entails. Writers need to learn how to communicate their ideas to others in the simplest, most easy way for everyone to immediately understand. This is especially important for people in the creative field.
This is a very smart article. Even if you have great ideas, if you can't express them clearly and succinctly in writing, they are not going to be perceived well. Grammar mistakes and wordiness are distractions that take away from a written idea. I especially agree with the focus on being concise; too often people think that using more words sounds more impressive, but nobody wants to be bogged down with excessive language.
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