3 ms·

I think writing well is a skill that is in very short supply all around, even in writing-focused areas like journalism. A major culprit in this, in my opinion,

I think writing well is a skill that is in very short supply all around, even in writing-focused areas like journalism. A major culprit in this, in my opinion, is how writing is taught in college. It's very common for students to be tasked with writing an essay with a minimum word count. This has been training people into the habit of being unnecessarily wordy and obtuse. What they should do, is give students a higher mark the less words they use to make their point.

necovek 7y ago
You overestimate people's ability and enjoyment in reading concise writing that has each word measured carefully. In order to pass an exam in university, I had to deliberately repeat myself in a few subtle ways, only to be commended how I managed to get my points across very concisely. I find that writing well is somewhere in the middle: people are used to skip-reading, so being very concise is counter-productive: unless you want to repeatedly point them to actual bits of text that answer their question but which they probably went over as only fill-text. So, I prefer to state my position concisely at the front, benefitting people like me who prefer it that way, and then expand it with examples and more elaborate arguments for those that need more. Like this post: the whole point is in the first sentence. The rest is just for the majority who'd basically not even read it, let alone bother to understand it. (As a consequence, I often miss the happy middle and become too elaborate: it's a struggle :))