Actually, that headline is redundant. All edits are annoying. If you care about your writing, that means you probably thought it was pretty good. So who is this other person to come in and change it? Who do they think they are? Well, they’re the person whose job it is to make your writing the…
I’ve spent a lot of time with some old people in a retirement community this week. What strikes me is that many elements of who they are were set long ago. It’s not that they can’t learn new things. Far from it. There is an enormous amount of learning going on here. They go to…
It is easier to keep writing than it is to start writing. Productive writers plan accordingly. Why is it easier to keep writing? Even if you don’t study physics, you’ve probably seen that if you try to move something heavy, like a car, it’s easier to keep something moving than it is to start something…
If you often sit down to write and feel frustrated, maybe you need to develop a new habit: writing away from the keyboard. And no, I don’t mean writing on paper or your phone. I mean writing in your head. Writing is problem-solving Writing is a puzzle. What’s the big idea? How do you start?…
When I was an analyst I would appear on TV news programs from time to time. The production staff would sometimes refer to “the talent” (for example, “Have you miked the talent yet?”). It took a moment for me to understand that I was “the talent.” The thing about the talent is that if you…
If I’m writing a document for you, you probably want to tell me what you thought of my draft. You could edit it with markup software. You could write me a note about it. You could forget to turn on the markup and just edit — don’t worry, I have tools that allow me to…
Let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine a time in your near future. You’ve written a book. It has made a big impact on a lot of people. Everyone who reads it says, “Wow, now I understand.” You have many fans, and they love what you’ve taught them. They talk about it often. You see people…
I hate slow projects. I like thrill rides. Consider this 2 x 2 describing the universe of potential freelance projects, with two dimensions for different types of speed. The horizontal axis describes the amount of work. Is this something that can be completed quickly, like a blog post or a tweet, or a big job…
E. B. White wrote some terrible sentences. So did Malcolm Gladwell. But you never got to read them. They didn’t publish bad sentences (or least, not very many.) Want better sentences? Prepare, then write, then edit. Prepare Don’t start writing by writing. Writing without preparation is like trying to pave a road without smoothing out…