Difference Between Good And Bad Writing – And How to Improve

This is a badly written (yes ironic) collection of tips for how to learn to write better. It can apply to both to nonfiction and fiction, perhaps a bit less to science.

Good writing is, in part, about

• persistence with feedback (any learning)
• rich life experience with reflection (have more to say)
• suitable goals, purpose
• understanding the minds of readers
• being authentic, natural, friendly – active and personal
• being informative, insightful, having fresh ideas
• having, expressing, and causing emotions
• simplicity, clarity, specificity, shortness
• variability (just enough)
• logical ordering, structure

Persistence is necessary. Keep writing and sending finished texts to publishers. Expect to write many drafts and edit them heavily each round. Read the text aloud so you really hear how it sounds (often pretentious or awkward). It might be helpful to edit top-down from chapters to punctuation. Get feedback early.

Practice writing with very short texts in social media. Follow reactions of the people and the algorithm. If you want more exposure in social media, you need to play the game of the platform. For example, in Twitter, it’s good to engage with large accounts and a few people every day.

Learn writing, build a distribution network, think about how to turn your writing into a product, and remember to automate your work. Publishing can be scheduled, interleaved, repeated – reminding is OK. Remember to repurpose your content across media and formats.

Practice by drafting, editing, and finishing many short texts with feedback. Continue to longer pieces. Have a list of all potential publishers (including social media) and keep sending your texts to them.

Collect rich life experiences. If you don’t have anything to say, go experience life more first. Real shared human experience is the basis of fictional stories too. Open up your heart and mind and understand your own life and experiences well to use them in your writing. Of course, you can also use others’ experiences from where ever you can get them.

Tap into your unique experiences – think about what you know now but your past-self didn’t. Differentiate yourself from others in the same space. One way to do this is to “pick your ideological enemy”. Niches are great in all content creation.

Practice by writing about your life experiences and reading other people’s experiences. Avoid hanging around in your room always – do more things in the world.

Specific goals and a strong purpose are key. Most importantly, you should have only a single interesting idea for a single piece of work. The reader should know the idea after reading the text and asking, “so, what was that about?“. This is a good goal. Don’t try to teach or have an impact too hard; it will only make you sound more didactic or propagandist which would act against your purpose. Let the reader discover fresh ideas autonomously – this is another good goal. Also, non-fiction usually gives a solution to a problem. If you want the reader to take some action, you should write this action down and figure out the necessary information to take the action – then you give the reader no more than this.

When creating ideas for writing, the more specific the better! And the more the better!

• What is the general topic? (what)
• Who is the target audience? (for whom)
• What is the intended effect to the audience (so that)
• Why should the audience trust you (own source of expertise, curating experts, opinion)
• What is the approach of the text (actionable how-to, statistical analytical, aspirational you-can-do-it, explanatory the-why)
• What kind of items are listed (steps, lessons, tips, mistakes, wrong-beliefs, quotes, ways, tools, trends, numbers, reasons, examples, moments, skills, traits, goals, books, habits, stories, secrets, insights, benefits, creators, routines, examples, questions, inventions, challenges, realizations, frameworks, presentations, interesting-abouts)
  • Unique, nonobvious, proven solutions to specific, obvious problems are valueable. Often some kind of framework helps you solve problems the most.
  • Stories can have different structures. One is to reveal the start and the end, and then tell what happened at the middle.
  • In the web, everything needs to start with a hook to get attention but the content must meet the expectation to gain any lasting traction.

Practice by writing down concise powerful ideas about the problems and solutions that you care about the most – and then practice leading into them without just telling the idea straightaway.

Understand your readers. Write what they need to hear and no more. Good writing would be extremely easy if you could jump into the minds of your readers while reading your drafts. You could predict how they react to every possible chapter and word, including what they would predict to come next. Often breaks between writing and reading help. And don’t forget that the times change. Good texts are often timely responses to the current state of the world. Know what your readers know and don’t know – then add and remove accordingly.

Practice switching roles, pretending to be a random active reader of your drafts. Strive to understand people in the world, both the timeless human nature and the current trends. Write briefly about the expectations and knowledge of the possible readers of your particular texts.

Write just like you would talk to a good friend in real life. This can reduce excessive formality, jargon, complication, aggressiveness, and other consequences of ‘trying too hard’. Natural speech is usually not in passive form either. Real authentic personality and personal experience are important. Don’t be too defensive or aggressive towards other people, just focus on the best ideas and making them as persuasive as possible. Obviously, the way we speak day-to-day can be incoherent and bad in other ways so don’t take this rule of thumb too seriously.

Practice writing while pretending that it’s only to your friend or partner or the like – or a version of them that is interested in the style of text you’re working on. Practice writing with a clearer awareness of the target reader. See how it differs from writing to a teacher, collegue, or other authorities. And how is it different from writing to yourself?

Information encoded by the text is what matters, not the text data itself. Being informative is basically about the amount of surprise (or defying predictions) or compression (or abstraction) – all the while the text still has clear structure and meaning to it. Knowledge is all about associations between, and integration of, individual concepts. You can keep your eye on the information by having a clear outline for the whole text – and it’s okay if this changes over time. Avoid the obvious, simplistic, boring, mundane, uninteresting, cliche, predictable, erroneous, redundant, overexplanatory, and irrelevant. Complex, nuanced, multidimensional, conflicting, paradoxical phenomena are interesting. Mystery and complex meaning are interesting. The plot needs to progress towards major events with every sentence.

Practice summarizing texts. Practice writing outlines for imaginary books or other texts. Write sentence-by-sentence with the explicit goal of predicting what comes next and then breaking that prediction one way or another. Take a few concepts and try to combine and connect them.

Emotions are necessary and what makes writing attractive in the end. Information cannot be effectively transferred without emotional resonance. Writer has emotions and attempts to express and transfer them through the text. Stories need to have high stakes, risk, challenge. Remember that persuasion happens usually by ‘converting’ people into your ‘tribe’ in a friendly way. Persuasion is almost impossible if the baseline difference in beliefs and sentiments is too large. All this requires some emotional and, in general, psychological knowledge.

Practice writing about the same idea but pretending to have different emotions. How does it affect the result? Next, practice writing about the same idea but trying to cause different emotions in the reader. Read about different emotions and increase your emotional vocabulary. Think about which emotions are the important to people and how are they arising now.

Simplicity is a default preference in language. Good writing gets out of the way. Text is often good when it has nothing left to remove. Remove as much as possible, shorten sentences, and write a new draft based on what’s left. Avoid trying ‘too hard’, trying to sound smart, or using language that is overly confusing, convoluted, complicated, wordy, awkward, redundant, inconsistent, technical, pretentious, or unusual. Flowery prose can be used to capture attention in key parts of the text. It’s better to be confident and avoid too many hedging words – uncertainty can be accurately described without them too. Use a single strong word (great) in place of weak word after modifiers (very good).

Every text should be clear about what it is and does. Don’t expect the readers to follow otherwise. Account names and titles are the most important places to set the correct expectation.

Practice simplicity simply by writing anything and then editing that with the explicit goal of simplifying it. Can each sentence be simpler without significant loss of information? Could each word be simpler without significant loss of information?

Find the sweetspot in variability. Mixing different kinds of sentences and words can prevent the numbing effects of repetition. Vocabulary needs to be wide enough to describe things in a rich way but not too wide to be understandable. Analogies, metaphors, and figures of speech should be few, fresh, and accurate. Short stories, quotes, dialogue, and so on can create variety to main explanatory text. Varying points of view in stories are too hard to follow. But ‘forcing’ any of this variability doesn’t really work – it must exist in the information itself. For example, just in everyday English, there are dozens of words for positive emotions that are close to ‘happy’ but different in many ways. Using these words properly requires emotional knowledge. Using them wrong makes a story that doesn’t feel real or relatable.

Practice by writing about the same idea using short sentences and long sentences, or poetic language and precise language. Come up with other strange restrictions and see how they affect your result.

Ordering makes a huge difference. The title and the first sentences usually tell the reader whether they want to finish the text or not. “What are these? Why should I care?” Ordering should maintain a flow of ideas in a way that the relationships of parts of text are clear and connected without a lot of guidance. You wouldn’t keep reading if each sentence didn’t carry on some reasons to continue to the next sentence. “What’s going to happen? I need to find out.” Temporal ordering in stories is a key decision as it can create interesting mysteries or revelations by tactically revealing certain events from the past or the future.

Before writing anything, you can pick some kind of standard template/structure for the text. Over time you can develop your own general templates for different situations. All writing starts as a list and gets expanded into a larger list. Texts should be skimmable like lists even after extending.

Knowledge representations can be very different, often forming some kind of hierarchy which is then layed down either top/bottom-up and breadth/depth-first. Good ordering starts from a consistent logic whatever this logic might be. The logic aims to give enough information now so that the next piece of information has the intended effect. As a minimum, the reader needs to understand what the next paragraph means. Too little and too much background can both be harmful. Information dumping in a style of a mini-lecture or an overly verbose sidenote can break a good string of thought.

Practice writing outlines with sole focus on ordering. Practice by writing something and then flipping paragraphs, sentences, and words around to see how these changes affect the whole read. Try to use a ridiculous amount of connecting and structuring language – and then very few – to see the difference. What kind of structure should an argument have? How about an ad, novel, textbook, scientific article?

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As a bonus, I was wondering, what is beautiful writing?

Beauty in writing may come from descriptions of beautiful things or from displays of skill and strength. Beautiful writing makes people think and feel something new or important about themselves, other people, and the world. It paints a picture in the reader’s mind without showing the picture. It’s also like beautiful music; it too has rhytmn, melodies, bridges, and hooks.