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Comment by kingkongjaffa | Hacker News Reader

I love reading and writing. Do you all have any advice for writing more and writing better?

Earlier this week I picked up a copy of On Writing Well by William Zinsser, a style guide on what he believes makes for good informal writing. It's yet to reflect in any of my comments but I'd recommend it if you struggle with being concise.

It does have a heavy focus on American writing and it's akin to a longform opinion piece, but I wouldn't let that get in the way of what makes for an accessible and pleasant read.

edit: What also helps is to sit down and write. Make a blog and even if you don't have a specific topic to focus on, just write and keep at it. Take a note of how you write, the style that you naturally develop with all of your quirks; do you overuse commas, do you routinely break up sentences with a dash or a semicolon? Does it have a sense of flow?

Before long something will click in your head, you'll become more cognisant of the world around you, and your head will be screaming at you to write certain thoughts and ideas down.

I second the recommendation for "On Writing Well." I read this many years ago, and the book had a strong positive influence on my writing (serving me very well when later doing editorial work, writing articles, and writing summaries, emails, and reports week-to-week).

George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" essay is a short essay that shares many of the pieces of advice [1]. The main principle that I've taken from both is that you will be more effective at getting your points across to the reader, if you optimize your writing for ease of comprehension, instead of attempting to sound sophisticated with unnecessarily fancy words. This is especially helpful in work environments, where getting your points across clearly can save yourself from delays due to confusion.

I would also strongly recommend reading good writing often. Becoming a regular reader of a well-written newspaper or magazine is great for learning new ways to write down observations or advance a point of argumentation, and I've also personally found it enjoyable to have a broader awareness of what's going on in the world.

[1] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

Any magazines that you recommend?

I've found Harper's and The New Yorker educational for good composition and writing style.

I share randcraw's recommendation of Harper's and The New Yorker, as I've subscribed to both and found their writing quality to be excellent. If you'd like to try them out, I recommend reading some of the past "Easy Chair" columns in Harper's for short-to-medium-length reflective essay articles. In The New Yorker, "A Reporter At Large" features are excellent (as they are thorough and often impactful to shaping current events upon publication), though the writing style is relatively lengthy.

If you like science reporting, The Atlantic has excellent reporters with this focus. The Scientific American and The New Scientist are also worth considering (along with the news and analysis-focused articles in the journals Nature and Science), though I've personally read The Atlantic more often as I'm also interested in the publication's articles about general topics outside of science reporting.

If you're interested in geopolitics, I highly recommend Foreign Affairs. The authors and contributors typically have interesting backgrounds in government or academia, and the essays are in-depth. Similarly to The New Yorker, the release of certain articles is itself newsworthy (often as senior policymakers of various countries are often guest writers)—as a direct result, the publication is closely read by senior policymakers of different countries. I also recommend The Diplomat as a comparable publication, with a specialized focus on news and analysis about geopolitics in East Asia.

If literary writing interests you, I would also recommend looking into some literary journals, such as The Paris Review, The Baffler, The Hedgehog Review, The Malahat Review, and Ploughshares.

These days, I personally listen to the audio versions of The New Yorker's Reporter At Large segments and The Atlantic's science reporting when I can. For the remaining publications, I typically download the ePub or PDF versions for reading on an e-reader (minus the publications that don't offer their issues in their format), and read just the articles that I find interesting on my commute.

For you personally, I would recommend identifying topics of interests that you are passionate about. You can then try to find high-quality publications about these subjects, which may or may not be on this list. If you're more interested in the focuses of the publications you read, you are more likely to develop a habit of reading well-written articles, which is helpful for improving your own ability to write.

This is a great response, thank you for taking the time! My current interests vary more or less around philosophy of mind, metaphysics, technology (less technical and more about our relationship to it), and sociology. I do have some sources for these such Aeon, Nautilus, and a couple of others, but was curious what other people deem as well-written magazines. I'm taking a look at some of the ones you suggested, thank you.

It's probably like photography: just do it a lot. Write about your home, your neighborhood. Edit: also read other writers' work, of course.

In novel writing there's very old advice: plan to throw away your first million words. Actually, that's good advice generally, not just for fiction.

Some great advice from Ben Kuhn on how & why of writing:

[1] https://www.benkuhn.net/writing

I also just published some structural tips for writing quickly at high quality:

[2] https://taylor.town/pseudoprose

Make sure to create a low-friction writing environment for yourself! Whether it's a notebook or text-editor, you should be able to get your idea onto paper within 90 seconds of having it.

Allocate a time of the day, every day, for writing. You can spend the time writing whatever comes to mind, working on a story, or staring out the window, or reading about writing. For the latter, I recommend this list:

https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/05/03/advice-on-writing/

At the risk of sounding smugly, just write. Perhaps ask someone to read your texts, but don't rely too much on random critics. Individual people have their own taste and pet peeves; what is unreadable for one may be enjoyable for others.

Writing is like hiking or skiing. While there are some important rules how not to kill yourself, you can only learn it by doing.

Also, read a lot, ESPECIALLY works by people who have a good command of your language (IDK if you are native English speaker; I am not). Writing style is a bit contagious. Don't worry if you occassionally sound like someone else, this kind of contagion is really unavoidable if you read a lot.

I would say that the optimal ratio of R:W time is about 5-6:1.

Depends what kind of writing you want to be better at, but for fiction Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’ is both interesting and useful. As for ‘more’, what’s worked for me is to make a routine for it.

I actually composed a free ebook about writing advice from many major writers.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSMJ_VIYylRcKIpb...

Hopefully this should help.

It depends :)

Do you have an idea what stands in the way of your ambitions?

Here are some suggestions (dang, I'm starting to sound like ChatGPT here):

1. Try an accountability partner and call them once a week to discuss progress.

2. Share your work, preferably to an audience you trust, and nourish feedback.

3. Experiment and train creativity. Write a short story, write with a pen, write technical documentation, write code.

Hope this helps.

Read and think about you read.

You can't get better at writing without reading as much as you can, as widely as you can.

Possibly the thing I do most is read comments on the internet, I'm not convinced it makes me a better writer, tbh.

I'm sorry, I thought it was obvious I meant read books, good books.

I do a daily writing exercise that is to write at least 1000 words, whatever comes to mind. No editing. Just let it flow and see where it takes you. When you get used to it (which you will do very quick) you will be surprised how it improves your writing skills.

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