The Secret to Good Writing
Throughout my whole life, I’ve constantly heard phrases like, “I’m so bad at writing”, “I can’t write”, “I’m just not good with my words”, from people who are extremely intelligent. They peer around at classmates and coworkers and convince themselves that they could never reproduce the style and the content of writing that others do. However, what they don’t know is that the art of forming a sentence has no one formula. There is no one way to create a sentence, to tell a story, or to express your feelings. Writing is an art form that requires no brain-surgeon knowledge, yet in many ways can be seen as impossible as surgery when frustration sets in.
As William Zinsser says in his book On Writing Well (2016), “There isn’t any ‘right’ way to do such personal work,” (p.18). Zinsser, a popular and successful writer even experiences the diversity in writing styles in his own career. For example, in the book when both Dr. Brock and him are giving advice to students about how best to write and tackle issues that arise from writing, they give completely different answers. Dr. Brock recommends that people set aside their writing if it’s not going well and pick it up another day, while Zinsser says that you can’t give up on it, you have to keep trying. This was only one example of the many that they disagreed on. Ultimately, this is important because it shows that there is no singular answer for the questions and worries that writers encounter. The one thing that writers shared is their common desire to evoke feeling and appeal from their audience. Writers write so that they can say the words that their readers wish they knew how to. They create homes for lost minds and comfort for lost hearts. By reading this book, I’ve grown a stronger appreciation for different styles of writing. For example, using the reference to the book from before, I would likely do what Dr. Brock said and set my writing aside until I had a clear mind again. Luckily, the good thing about writing is its very subjective and therefore what works for you may not necessarily work for me.
For the assignment this week, I furthered my knowledge on putting together a good piece of writing by viewing some surrounding examples on the web. I focused in on analyzing different blogs because I felt these would be the most enjoyable to read and view. The two that I compared were Blogitude and Design for Mankind. Design for Mankind was a great example of a readable blog because of the diversity of font thickness used, the different styles of text, and the simplicity in the color scheme. Blogitude was not readable at all because there was no space between the text and the ads were very distracting throughout the site.
It was helpful to see different kinds of blogs as well as apply what I learned in my reading so that I could see that although there’s not a singular formula to good writing, there are formulas for readability and appeal which are arguably just as important as the content you’re writing.