Improving your writing

Order Description
Assignment Description:

Improving your writing

In a brief reflection (800-1,000 words), you should discuss one of the methods for further improving your writing we talked about this week. �

Option 1: Author Interviews:

Briefly summarize two author interviews you listened to this week
Talk about any advice they gave about writing and why you found it useful
Describe any information they gave about their writing process
Analyze how you can apply this information in your future writing experiences

Option 2: Reading about Writing:

Briefly summarize the author’s main argument and evidence from one of the assigned readings
Talk about any advice the author gave�about writing and why you found it useful
Describe how the author approaches writing, its importance, and the process
Analyze how you can apply this information in your future writing experiences�.

Ways to Improve Your Writing:
As we approach the end of our course, I want to leave you with some ways to continue the conversations we have had over the course of the term. �After all, the course might be over, but the practice and improvement of writing never ends. �Use this presentation for some concrete ways you can improve your writing (especially during the break!).

How to Improve Your Writing:
There are four methods to refresh and retain your writing skills:
1-Read more
2-Read better
3-Write more
4-Write better

Reading about Writing :
One of the best ways to improve your writing is to read (read more! read better!) about writing. �Reading about writing puts us into conversation with others who can teach us new ideas and ways of understanding the writing process. �Here are some examples:

“Sentences Crisp, Sassy, Stirring”.
This is the sixth in a series of writing lessons by the author, starting with the basics and leading to more advanced techniques.
Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez writes unhurried sentences that almost defy parsing. William Faulkner wrote a nearly 1,300-word sentence that ended up in Guinness World Records, but he used the five words �My mother is a fish� as a complete chapter of a book. Joan Didion can stop us short with simple truths, and she can take us on strolls down labyrinthine corridors.
Trust these great writers: There is no one way to render an idea. Let�s explore how masters of the sentence play with length and style to make their sentences distinctive. But first, let�s review what we have learned along the way about how sentences can be organized.
Short, long and layered
As I mentioned in my first post, the essence of a sentence involves the pairing of a subject with a predicate, a What and a So What, a protagonist and a story. And that�s all it takes to make a simple sentence, like one that might appear in the arts pages of a newspaper: A popular musical is coming to Broadway.
A sentence can be simple without being stark. It can have a compound subject or a compound predicate. It can also contain any number of the kinds of phrases we explored in my last post.
Another way to let sentences stretch out and say a little more is to join them to one another. The easiest way to do this is to use a coordinating conjunction like and or but. When we do this, we call the individual parts clauses and the combined whole, including the conjunction, a compound sentence (Cheerleaders are returning to Broadway, and theatergoers will have 12 weeks to see them).
Sometimes we want to express an idea with more complexity than simple and compound sentences allow. Perhaps we want to draw attention to a cause and its effect, or to express relationships in time or to put a rhetorical finger on a paradox. In these cases, we can join two clauses with subordinating conjunctions like because, if, although or when. As the name of the joiner suggests, we are putting ideas into a kind of hierarchy, subordinating one to another. The result is a complex sentence.
And then, of course, we can combine styles into a compound-complex sentence, which really adds twists and turns. Here�s an example from this newspaper: �Broadway producers rarely open shows in summertime, when tourist-dominated audiences are biggest for long-running hits, but a new musical-comedy is moving into the St. James Theater in July: �Bring It On,� a spinoff on the battle-of-the-cheerleaders movie from 2000 starring Kirsten Dunst.�
Joe Mortis
Sentence tone
So far, I�ve been focusing on how meaning might determine the way we express an idea. But different sentences carry different weight, and we can craft them not just to get an idea across, but also to convey attitude or elicit emotion. Sentences inform us, but they can also touch us.
Simple sentences can pack a punch or deliver a punch line. Muhammad Ali depended on them to make his point: �I am the astronaut of boxing. Joe Louis and Dempsey were just jet pilots. I�m in a world of my own.� Ads and adages also often use simple sentences to convey something straightforward (A diamond is forever), authoritative (Don�t change horses in midstream) or cheeky (A little dab�ll do ya).
Combining simple sentences with longer, more complex lines can give a passage rhythm and heighten drama. The novelist Raymond Chandler is known for �hard-boiled� prose, like these powerful clauses he uses to describe the Santa Ana winds in his short story �Red Wind�:
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight.
Joan Didion also follows a fluid sentence with short, crisp ones when describing the same winds in her book �Slouching Towards Bethlehem�:
I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks.
Those last three blunt sentences have the harsh force of the winds Didion is describing.
Literary lions like Ernest Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy have a reputation for short sentences, because both authors are so good at paring things to the bone. But often they string their stripped-down clauses along exquisite filaments, producing paragraphs like this one, from McCarthy�s �The Road�:
Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.
The phrases and clauses in that sentence, written without punctuation, add up to a kind of rushing prose, seemingly spontaneous, but highly crafted. Such rhythms can be almost biblical in their power.
Sometimes it�s not ands and buts that hold disparate images in equilibrium, but uncommon punctuation. In this passage from �Sula,� Toni Morrison describes Shadrack, a shell-shocked World War I veteran just released from a hospital:
Twenty-two years old, weak, hot, frightened, not daring to acknowledge the fact that he didn�t even know who or what he was . . . with no past, no language, no tribe, no source, no address book, no comb, no pencil, no clock, no pocket handkerchief, no rug, no bed, no can opener, no faded postcard, no soap, no key, no tobacco pouch, no soiled underwear and nothing nothing nothing to do . . . he was sure of one thing only: the unchecked monstrosity of his hands.
With ellipses, repetition and a surprising final image, Morrison circles around and then pinpoints the mystery of identity.
Sometimes we don�t so much want a seamless flow, or a drum of ideas punctuated with commas and ellipses, but rather hard pauses, urgent twists, high tension. Then we bring in subordinate clauses.
A seemingly insignificant as can provide a nice pivot. A sentence that begins with if builds anticipation right in. A string of whereases can lead to a hard and fast law � or an indictment. A series of when clauses, building to a final then clause, give rhetorical urgency.
Subordination can be dramatic and weighty, but it can also be light-hearted. Groucho Marx understood this, as he demonstrated at the end of this riff from the movie �Duck Soup�:
You�d better beat it. I hear they�re going to tear you down and put up an office building where you�re standing. You can leave in a taxi. If you can�t leave in a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that�s too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff.
Comedic or commanding, light or lofty, the tone of sentences is set by language, length, phrasing and style. Mastering tone is a matter of stripping your ideas to the essence, then playing with all these devices to shade your meaning.Constance Hale;

By clicking on the title , you will go to a�New York Times�article, “Sentences Crisp, Sassy, Stirring,” by Constance Hale (2012). �This article talks about the importance of sentences as the building blocks of information. As you read the article, consider the following questions:
What is the author’s main argument?
What does the author use for evidence?
In the author’s opinion, why does sentence structure matter?
How do you use sentence structure? �
Is it something you think about as you write?
If so, what is your thought process?
If not, how can you be more deliberate?
How does the article help you to think about writing choices?
How will you apply this information to improve your writing?
By clicking on the title , you will go to a�New York Times�article, “How to Write How-To,” by Augusten�Borroughs�(2012). �This article talks about giving advice in writing. As you read the article, consider the following questions:
What is the author’s main argument?
What does the author use for evidence?
In the author’s opinion, how can you define confidence?
What is the role of failure for the author?
How does the author relate failure with the writing process?
How does the article help you to think about writing choices?
How will you apply this information to improve your writing?

“How to Write How-To”
In order to pass along the knowledge of how to succeed, first you must know how to fail. A great deal, if possible. This is essential because it�s far more common (and easier) to make mistakes than to enjoy success. Being aware of potential points of derailment helps to better and more accurately navigate your readers past your own missteps so they can succeed where perhaps you first failed quite miserably.
I happen to be an unparalleled authority on the subject of failure, both through scholarship and experience � though I recommend the latter, as I believe gaining failure �in the field� is superior to passively acquiring failure from books. One can bake a perfect chocolate cake on the first attempt, but that does not impart the same authority of cakemanship as does baking a perfect chocolate cake after numerous epic fails.
The writing process for my advice/self-help book, �This Is How,� was unlike my experiences of writing a novel or memoir. I was less concerned with the craft of artful, attractive, witty sentences, and entirely concerned with clarity and specificity. I felt no need to maintain the levity of my previous books because the point of �This Is How� was not to entertain but to inform, challenge, help make minor psychological repairs and enlighten.
I was not writing on a single topic, like �How to Invest Wisely in a Post-Occupy Economy� (though I have ample documentation of my impressive failures in this area). I wanted to show people how a deeper honesty with themselves when assessing their lives could resolve many common psychological issues. Many people mistakenly assume they know �the truth� about their situations. In order to familiarize readers with what I called the deeper �truth behind the truth,� I pulled examples from my life, but I also freely explored issues I have not faced myself, like obesity or the loss of a child. I did this to demonstrate how my approach to resolving my own issues is modular, unrelated to the issues themselves.
This seemed the cleanest, strongest way to demonstrate my thesis. When discussing confidence, for instance, I ask first what this confidence thing is that people want more of. Can you go to the doctor and get your blood-�confidence level checked? I then lead readers through the steps I myself took when breaking confidence down to its more elemental amino acids. The typical advice for gaining confidence � being better at what you do � is wrong; one can be inept yet confident (a frighteningly common human condition, I�ve found). I theorize that confidence isn�t something you feel internally, but rather a trait others ascribe to you when you�re focused and comfortable with what you�re doing. So you don�t need more confidence. You need less of something you already have in excess: caring what other people think about you. Concentrate on the thing you�re doing, not on what people are thinking as you do it, and they�ll perceive you as confident.
This is not a description of confidence I could have gathered through academic study of the subject. Only by having lived with very �low confidence� (that is, endless preoccupation with others and their imagined opinions of me) and struggling daily with self-assertion, only by stripping the word �confident� itself of preconceived assumptions and smashing the concept with the mental Hammer of Truth, could I write this more accurate description of confidence.
Personally, I wouldn�t feel comfortable writing any sort of how-to book with anything resembling authority unless I was deeply aware of exactly how not to.

By clicking on the title , you will go to a�New York Times�article, “On Not Writing,” by�Bill Hayes�(2014). �This article talks about finding writing concepts in everyday life. �As you read the article, consider the following questions:
What is the author’s main argument?
What does the author use for evidence?
What does the writer learn about writing by ‘not writing’?
How can taking a break from writing help you to be better at writing?
Which of the principles about writing / exercise did you find most applicable? Why?
How will you apply this information to improve your writing?

“On Not Writing”

I started writing this essay five years ago, and then I stopped. That I was not able to finish the piece did not strike me at the time as ironic but as further proof that whatever I once had in me � juice, talent, will � was gone. In any case, completing it would have made moot the very point I was attempting to make: Not writing can be good for one�s writing; indeed, it can make one a better writer.
I hadn�t given up writing deliberately, and I cannot pinpoint a particular day when my not-writing period started, any more than one can say the moment when one is overtaken by sleep: It�s only after you wake that you realize how long you were out. Nor did I feel blocked at first. Lines would come to me then slip away, like a dog that loses interest in how you are petting it and seeks another hand. This goes both ways. When I lost interest in them, the lines gradually stopped coming. Before I knew it, two years had passed with scarcely a word.
I didn�t miss it, yet at the same time I felt something missing: A phantom voice, one might say. I had been pursuing writing since I was a kid, had published pieces in many places, and written three books back to back. I was nearing 50. To have silence and neither deadlines nor expectations for the first time in decades was sort of nice � and sort of troubling. Can one call oneself a writer when not-writing is what one actually does, day after day after day?
I never lied. If someone asked, I�d say I was not working on anything, and no, had nothing on the back burner, in the oven, cooking, percolating or marinating. (What�s with all the food metaphors anyway?) I wasn�t hungry either.
At a party one night, a very artistic looking young man with an Errol Flynn mustache warned me that I must not take a break for too long. �It won�t come back,� he said gravely. �I stopped writing in 1999, and now I can barely write a press release.�
I can�t say this didn�t scare me a bit. What if I really never wrote or published again?
I wouldn�t be in bad company, I told myself. After �Joe Gould�s Secret,� Joseph Mitchell published nothing new in his remaining 31 years. E.M. Forster published no more novels between �A Passage to India� and his death 46 years later. And then there were those hall of fame figures: J.D. Salinger, who published nothing for the last half of his life, and Harper Lee, whose post-Mockingbird silence should be enough to canonize her, the patron saint of not-artists of any discipline.
But let�s be real: I�m not them, and not-writing is not a way to support oneself. So I got a job (not writing-related), then moved to a new city, found another job, this time in fund-raising for a nonprofit organization, and eventually enrolled in a course to become a certified personal fitness trainer. Classes were held in the basement of a gym. I did it for fun, and more pragmatically, as a Plan B, a way to support myself if I got laid off (a real possibility). But it was there, unexpectedly, that I found my way back to writing full time, a framework for moving forward and validation for what I had done instinctively.
Fitness training today is generally built upon six major concepts (though they may go by different terms, depending upon the certifying agency), and each of these, I found, has a correlative in writing.
First, there is the Principle of Specificity. This states that what you train for is what you get: If it is strength you want, train for strength. In short, be specific. Writing 101, right? It�s all in the details.
Next: The Overload Principle, training a part of the body above the level to which it is accustomed. You must provide constant stimuli so the body never gets used to a given task; otherwise, expect no change. So too with writing: Push yourself, try new things � creative cross-training, I call it.
This leads to the Principle of Progression. Once you master new tasks, move on. Don�t get stuck � whether on a paragraph or an exercise regimen. If you do, this will lead to Accommodation. With no new demands placed upon it, the body reaches homeostasis � not a good place to find oneself. Here, everything flattens out. So, don�t get too comfortable; it will show on the page as clearly as in the mirror.
When stimuli are removed, gains are reversed � use it or lose it, the Principle of Reversibility. Just as movement in any form is better than none at all � walk around the block if you can�t make it to Spin class � one must do something, anything, to keep the creative motor running. After I stopped writing, for instance, I bought a camera and started taking photographs instead.
And finally, the Rest Principle, the tenet that gave me particular solace. To make fitness gains, whether in strength, speed, stamina or whatever your aim (see Principle of Specificity), you must take ample time to recover.
I had been working out as long as I had been writing, so this last principle was not new to me. Overtraining without taking days off can lead to injuries, chronic fatigue and, frankly, pain. But I had never observed this rule very strictly when it came to working on a piece of writing. Just as the body needs time to rest, so too does an essay, story, chapter, poem, book or a single page.
In some cases, it is not just the writing that needs a breather but the writer, too. On this matter, I quote from a National Council on Strength and Fitness training manual, one of the textbooks we used in our personal training course. Here, fatigue is defined as �an inability to contract despite continued neural stimulation� (what a bodybuilder might call a failure to flex, you and I might call writer�s block, in other words).
�As the rate of motor unit fatigue increases,� the manual goes on, �the effect becomes more pronounced, causing performance to decline proportionately to the level of fatigue. Periods of recovery enable a working tissue to avoid fatigue for longer periods of time� During the recovery period, the muscle fibers can rebuild their energy reserves, fix any damage resulting from the production of force, and fully return to normal pre-exertion levels.�
Translation: Don�t work through the pain; it will only hurt. Give yourself sufficient time to refresh.
How long should this period be? What is true for muscle fibers is true for creative ones as well. My rule of thumb in fitness training is 2-to-1: For every two days of intense workouts, a day off. However, �in cases of sustained high-level output,� according to my manual, full recovery may take longer. This is what had happened with me. I needed a really, really long rest.
Then I woke one day, and a line came to me. It didn�t slip away this time but stayed put. I followed it, like a path. It led to another, then another. Soon, pieces started lining up in my head, like cabs idling curbside, ready to go where I wanted to take them. But it wasn�t so much that pages started getting written that made me realize that my not-writing period had come to an end. Instead, my perspective had shifted.
Writing is not measured in page counts, I now believe, any more than a writer is defined by publication credits. To be a writer is to make a commitment to the long haul, as one does (especially as one gets older) to keeping fit and healthy for as long a run as possible. For me, this means staying active physically and creatively, switching it up, remaining curious and interested in learning new skills (upon finishing this piece, for instance, I�m going on my final open-water dive to become a certified scuba diver), and of course giving myself ample periods of rest, days or even weeks off. I know that the writer in me, like the lifelong fitness devotee, will be better off.