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The best writing advice I ever got was from a college professor—"everybody's got 100 bad essays in them. You just have to get them out." I feel like this is wh
by idlewords 2y ago
The best writing advice I ever got was from a college professor—"everybody's got 100 bad essays in them. You just have to get them out."
I feel like this is what blogging is especially good for. You can clear out the awful stuff and then try to incrementally improve.
I would diametrically disagree with point #7—if you want to write well, you need to revise the hell out of it. I guess pick whose writing you like better, between me and the author, and take the corresponding advice.
- lazyant 2y agoyes; quantity leads to quality
- deadbabe 2y agoIt’s better to get those bad essays out in the form of comments, you get instant feedback and you’ll know what works and what doesn’t work when you go to write a real blog.
- alxexperience 2y agoWhile I agree, I know it can be hard to start writing as well, because you are so worried about the quality. One of my professors from college brought up a great point that "No one will read your shitty first draft except you." I find that phrase very helpful, because usually when I write, the first draft is always a giant mess. But you're able to craft it and edit it the best way that you can. So you can push out what you think is good work, and continue to improve as you write more.
- idlewords 2y agoIt is very scary. Oddly that makes blogs kind of a good place to start, since almost no one will find them or read them. It's public writing, but a lot less nerve-wracking than putting yourself out there in other formats (like forum posts).
- 1dom 2y agoI don't consider myself a writer, but it sounds like you do. I find forum posts far, far less nerve-wracking than a blog post. For me, a forum post is almost like how the original article describes a chat: it feels closer to realtime, and feels easier, because it's just like playing a normal role in a conversation. It's normally a response to something, expecting a response. A blog post feels closer to a formal publication, and I feel like they're more expected to stand on their own, without the justification and context helpfully provided by others' posts.
- nthingtohide 2y ago> then try to incrementally improve My technique is Da Vinci method just collect / discover lot of shiny pieces. Then stitch them together later. Develop these pieces separately like colored glass pieces in a mosaic, sort of inversion of divide and conquer, collect and assemble.
- _glass 2y agoI was doing this, and then it is confusing for people to follow. Nowadays I do this, too. But when I am ready, I write up everything once, then add in the details.
- wholinator2 2y agoYeah, I've been collecting many bits on my obsidian notes but I'm still in the stage of mostly dreaming of putting them together. But it is very interesting to see what thoughts i deem worthy of recording and which i don't. It's helped me significantly to form a coherent understanding of the world and politics, and i suspect one day it'll help me with finding novel research for my PhD
- greenie_beans 2y agothere's a lot of good writing advice out there, but some of the best i got was from a college professor, too. i will botch it: each sentence should make sense based on every prior sentence. each sentence should be able to stand alone on its own sheet of paper.
- greenie_beans 2y agoi had the perfect restatement of this pop in my head later during the day and then i forgot it! write each sentence on a single sheet of paper.
- wodenokoto 2y agoIn high school I did a report on a local poet and author. What struck me back then was he said in an interview that you need to go through at least a thousand sheets of paper before you start producing anything good. As a high schooler dreading to write a 4 page report on the guy, a thousand pages sounded ludicrous.
- thomastjeffery 2y agoThis is what I tend to use HN/Reddit comments for... I know I would probably be better off writing a blog, but I'm too busy procrastinating to make that happen.