5 Common Writing Mistakes to Avoid. Wait ‘til the boss sees this! With a cursory glance at your office masterpiece on the screen, you put your finger on the send button. Yep, everything looks pretty good with just a couple of squiggly lines under a few words where you transposed a letter or two. You easily fix them, and you’re good to go! Press send, work done, relieved sigh. Not so fast. Popular document programs don’t pick up misused words in documents, and certain words are so commonly misused in casual writing that we sometimes become blind to the errors.
The basic rules of English learned in grade school seem to be ignored in the interest of getting out the message. Interchanging “your” and “you’re”: “Your” is a possessive, as in, “This is your email” and “Do you like sugar in your latte, sir?” Another pesky mistake is switching “than” and “then”: “Than” is a word that is used when comparing two or more things, as in “I would rather be bowling than writing this email,” or “My cubicle is smaller than his.” The Ultimate Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do. Writing is a muscle. Smaller than a hamstring and slightly bigger than a bicep, and it needs to be exercised to get stronger. Think of your words as reps, your paragraphs as sets, your pages as daily workouts. Think of your laptop as a machine like the one at the gym where you open and close your inner thighs in front of everyone, exposing both your insecurities and your genitals. Because that is what writing is all about.
Procrastination is an alluring siren taunting you to google the country where Balki from Perfect Strangers was from, and to arrange sticky notes on your dog in the shape of hilarious dog shorts. The blank white page. Mark Twain once said, “Show, don’t tell.” Finding a really good muse these days isn’t easy, so plan on going through quite a few before landing on a winner.
There are two things more difficult than writing. It’s no secret that great writers are great readers, and that if you can’t read, your writing will often suffer.
Snoopy's Guide to the Writing Life: Ray Bradbury on Creative Purpose in the Face of Rejection. By Maria Popova “The blizzard doesn’t last forever; it just seems so.” Famous advice on writing abounds — Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 tips on how to make a great story, David Ogilvy’s 10 no-bullshit tips, Henry Miller’s 11 commandments, Jack Kerouac’s 30 beliefs and techniques, John Steinbeck’s 6 pointers, and various invaluable insight from other great writers. In Snoopy’s Guide to the Writing Life, Barnaby Conrad and Monte Schulz, son of Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz, bring a delightfully refreshing lens to the writing advice genre by asking 30 famous authors and entertainers to each respond to a favorite Snoopy comic strip with a 500-word essay on the triumphs and tribulations of the writing life. The all-star roster includes William F. Buckley, Jr., Julia Child, Ed McBain, and Elizabeth George, but my favorite contribution comes from the always-insightful Ray Bradbury: What a fine complement to this recent omnibus of wisdom on how to find your purpose and do what you love.
Donating = Loving. Jack Kerouac's List of 30 Beliefs and Techniques for Prose and Life. Six Tips on Writing from John Steinbeck. By Maria Popova If this is indeed the year of reading more and writing better, we’ve been right on course with David Ogilvy’s 10 no-nonsense tips, Henry Miller’s 11 commandments, and various invaluable advice from other great writers. Now comes Pulitzer Prize winner and Nobel laureate John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902–December 20, 1968) with six tips on writing, originally set down in a 1962 letter to the actor and writer Robert Wallsten included in Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (public library) — the same magnificent volume that gave us Steinbeck’s advice on falling in love. Steinbeck counsels: Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper.
If you’re bold enough to defy Steinbeck’s anti-advice advice, you can do so with these nine essential books on more and writing. . ↬ Open Culture.
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