In regards to point 2: Having kids and reading tons of books out loud to them has really impressed upon me how important this is. Reading my own writing out loud has been a real turning point for me in developing my writing skills.

I use the text to speech in my articles as a 'read it out loud' exercise.

Thanks for sharing these observations. Im not much of a writer but would love to improve on my writing skills. I personally have the most problem with 3 and the only way I could get more productive brain dumps is to record myself talking freely instead, then rewrite it. But this is a time consuming process and was wondering what kind of exercises/drills I could use to ease the brain dump constipation. To me there's something that blocks me when I attempt to write something down freely but I feel that that the right exercises would ease it. I feel like Im making a wrong step somewhere that makes me become self conscious at the wrong moment.

Hey Adam, the content itself is great and the tips are bang on. However, I think you should proof read the article again. An article on 'Improving Your Writing' loses a lot of credibility when it has sentences like:

> The character, 'hotel' has does an action 'wanted'.

which should be:

> The character, 'hotel', has an action, 'wanted'.

It also seems like you rely on a single source, Williams and Colomb (1990). Is this your personal summary of that book? Do you recommend reading it, or do you believe your post captures the most important points?

Thanks for making the post. Focusing on creating a clear thesis at the start of your blog will help your readers understand the purpose of your post.

The first paragraph communicates you've struggled with writing in the past, the second para says writing advice is often low quality, and the third paragraph explains the characteristics of good writing (hints at the thesis).

You could make a single thesis like this: "This post explains the characteristics of good writing and how I was able to improve my writing skills."

You could continue with "learning to write well was a great personal struggle, especially because writing training materials didn't help". That could also be considered a separate thesis for a different post.

Paragraphs like these can be made more concise:

> Most writers struggle to write well when the subjects use technical terms. Technical terms are confusing when they are not introduced properly. This technique is helpful when communicating complex information that requires technical terms. When you introduce complex information, design the sentence that it appears in, so that you can locate that term at the end.

Here's how you could reword it:

Technical writing is difficult, especially when the terminology is not properly introduced. It's best to introduce technical terms at the end of sentences.

Native English speaker here. For me, any sentence with more than one comma is telling me that it's not one sentence. It's two, three, or four sentences. And to be clear, I'm talking about sentences that are very long, not sentences that contain a list of items such as the previous sentence. Example:

-----------------------------------------------------------

The more I write, the more I realize that sentence structure matters, as does grammar, and even spelling, and also choice of words, which affects some readers for whom English is a non-primary language.

As I write more, I realize that sentence structure, grammar, and spelling matter. My choice of words is important because unnecessary complexity may negatively affect some readers.

-----------------------------------------------------------

It wasn't always this way. 50 years ago, it was common for sentences to be much longer. I often read stories to my wife that were written in the 50's, 60's, and 70's. They are personal accounts, not professional writing. Life stories. They quite often include sentences that take more than one breath to read aloud, because they are so incredibly long that they deplete me of oxygen before I can finish reading the sentence, which I do find quite difficult to read since I am now concentrating on my breathing instead of on the written word, which is not just awkward but also distracting.

YMMV.

This is also the case in my native language (French), I assume it's pretty common for Latin languages.

That's not how science works. "Have been found" is not a weasel phrase, it's an accurate description of empirical observations.

I'm a little cautious of that. “have been found” implies a correlation but reserves some doubt; to omit it is to say the correlation is extremely strong, effectively beyond doubt. That's a strong implication. To leave that quaifier phrase in suggests the author recognises the signal is noisy and some other experts may disagree about the correlation being present.

Anyway, I really appreciate this kind of thing. There's too much bullshit writing and I'm glad someone is pushing back.

(Edited for clarity)

OP here. Taking ownership of the statement is an interesting perspective. I've never thought of that. In my experience, when I take ownership, my writing tends to feel more honest. I acknowledge what I know or don't know, which makes the writing clearer for the readers.

Start with a mind map.

If the goal of your writing is clear, it's easy to make an outline once the mind map is done. If the goal isn't clear, start asking questions about why it isn't clear and expand the mind map until there's enough there to continue. Sometimes this requires research while constructing the mind map, especially for assigned academic writing. Tag pages with sticky notes or copy data with references into a large research doc as you go.

Once the outline is done, the rest is straightforward. An editor always helps if you can afford one, but you don't always need to agree with the suggested changes.

In my experience it’s got more to do with expectations.

https://karimdaghari.netlify.app/blog/get-things-done/

I always think about the reader: what do I want them to learn or understand? Then, how can I best get there without losing their attention, and, if context allows, make it entertaining.

"The principle suggests us to focus..." Should not it be: "The principle suggests that we focus..."?

> I can bear the pain of writing in high school, but I almost gave up in university

And this should be "could"?

Pinker writes a useful explanation:

> A process called nominalization takes a perfectly spry verb and embalms it into a lifeless noun by adding a suffix like –ance, –ment, or –ation. Instead of affirming an idea, you effect its affirmation; rather than postponing something, you implement a postponement. Helen Sword calls them "zombie nouns" because they lumber across the scene without a conscious agent directing their motion.[0]

There is a lot more detail in his book "Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century"

[0]: https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/why_academics_st...

The later is hardly clear writing. I think you've mistaken terseness and informality for clarity.

You misconstrue "wise spending" with "allocating funds to areas that need the most assistance". The two are not informationally equivalent.

You leave out the information that you know nothing about local conditions. Presumably you've jumped to conclusions about what local conditions means.

And lastly, it must be pointed out that a perfectly valid interpretation of your version is that you were unable to form an opinion on the committees spending because you got lost in the carpark/ building/town...

I think one could arguably simplify the original further to:

"Knowing nothing about local conditions, we could not determine how effectively the committee allocated funds to areas needing the most assistance."

But it's very hard to move past that without fundamental information changing, and even my changes I accept are a little bit stylistically subjective, albeit with a marginally lower word count to convey fundamentally the same information.

Your version shows the problem with taking advice to "omit needless words" too far. The main virtue of good writing is clarity, and that often needs more words than a maximally compressed sentence. Your version omits useful information, is imprecise, and uses a vague idiom that is easily misinterpreted. In short, it doesn't say the same thing.

The first example smacks of writing which is not so much unclear as it is deliberately banal and devoid of impact, as famously described by Orwell here: https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...

Personally, the main motivation I have is to improve my writing for documentation that's intended to be read by coworkers (a specific, professional audience.) I wouldn't be surprised if most people on HN feel the same way.

Agreed. If I'm writing an English novel, I wouldn't be writing it in simple and terse sentences.

This one seems to be 100% USA, and then spread over social media. The same as Valley-speak became really popular after Clueless came out in the 90s. I can't recall seeing 'welp' anywhere before 2017.

> Does the word "drinks" also bother you?

No, but if you went to a pub and had several 'drinkings', then yes.

"Learnings" is incorrect.

> Does a language get to change and evolve at all?

Yes, and despite my dislike for "learnings" it looks like it is here to stay unfortunately. It's "business English", amplified by the internet. When I tell friends and family about "learnings" their response is, to put it mildly, "who are these idiots?"

Historical language evolution is towards shorter words, when those words are heavily used. Who knows how the Internet is going to change the language?

I think you'll appreciate Suzie Dent's twitter account: https://twitter.com/susie_dent

Your stackexchange post corrects itself fruther down. Ye was the plural and thee the singular. You was accusative.

> Feynman said, that if you cannot explaind it to a child you do not understand it, not that you should communicate with everyone like they were kids.

That's not what I said, there was a full stop, not a comma. I was applying Feynman's idea to writing, if you can't explain something simply in plain English, you really should rewrite it to reach a wider audience.

> I hate seeing advice like "use simple, reduced vocabulary".

Sure, and if articles are written 'normally', for people with English as a second language, that means that they will learn more English words when they encounter new ones.

However "I" is one person, and an author wants to reach the widest audience, with the lowest common denominator. I don't understand much German or French, for example, but an article written in simple German or French is much more accessible to me (the lowest common denominator).

Writing is about reaching all of your audience.

Simple, reduced vocabulary is not dumbing things down. It is about using most common words available for the usage.

The word count is interesting. Presumably that's to approximately fill a "page", and provide a "familiar feel" to all articles on a site written by different authors?

That's a good link and states what I was trying to say:

"""Good content is easy to read

Good online content is easy to read and understand.

It uses:

    short sentences
    sub-headed sections
    simple vocabulary

This helps people find what they need quickly and absorb it effortlessly.

The main purpose of GOV.UK is to provide information - there’s no excuse for putting unnecessarily complicated writing in the way of people’s understanding."""