1. Relax. Anxiety clogs the brain. Writing, playing with ideas and seeing what works, should be fun and creative. When you get stuck, don’t dig a deeper ditch. Try something else. Brainstorm (See No. 2). Visualize real-life situations, involving specific people, scenes, and action (see No. 3). Think about dilemmas that people might want to solve. Or pick a passage from a reading and try to see how it fits into the larger scheme of things. If it helps, imagine exaggerated, even comical or nonsensical, situations. 2. Brainstorm. Especially at the beginning of the writing process, but also throughout the process, you need to explore every possible idea and piece of evidence possible. Think of every situation and concept that could have a bearing on your subject. Do not sort ideas until you have allowed them first to flow unobstructed. Try to brainstorm ideas onto one sheet of paper. If you need a big sheet of paper, that’s fine. But you need to see everything in one place. Once you have brainstormed, you need to separate concepts from illustrations or facts. Then you need to consider what the most important or surprising ideas or relationships might be. Ask yourself the kind of questions that would interest you if you were a reader or audience. 3. Visualize. Try to visualize real-world situations, and then understand the cause/effect relationship arising from that situation. Close your eyes and imagine a scene from a movie. Visualize characters struggling over something important. Think about the tensions between the characters—and also those within each character. In order to get to important concepts, we need to imagine the real-world implications of those concepts. The battles over issues like abortion, divorce, torture, immigration, medical care, labor relations, and countless other issues matter not because of some abstract ideas. They matter because they affect real people. To understand abstract ideals, you need to understand the human conflicts behind them. Once we can visualize real-world situations, we can begin to see patterns that explain human behavior. 4. Keep things simple. The best way to present complex ideas is to break them down, simply. Always look for a simpler argument and a simpler way of expressing that argument. Look for the simple subject-verb-object statement in every sentence. Whenever possible, express things in the simple S-V-O form: “Derek Jeter booted the ground ball” or “President Bush criticized antiwar activists.” Of course, you will need more complex constructions too. But always make sure you know who’s doing what. 5. Be a constant gardener. Look for ways to express your ideas more simply. Look for common errors of grammar and spelling. Harry Shaw once wrote: “There is no such thing as good writing. There is only good rewriting.” To present ideas clearly, we need to clear out the clutter—needless words, repetitive sentences, clichéd statements, unrevealing quotations. We need to make sure the writing’s architecture reveals itself as clearly as the foundation and shell at a construction site. And we need to make sure to use simplest sentence structure—usually the S-V-O structure. The most common challenges of grammar and style: • Wordiness, repetition, overstatements, and statements of the obvious • Sentence fragments and run-on sentences • Problems with proper names and second-reference pronouns • Double negatives • Hanging participles • Wordy introductory fluff (“It is interesting to note...”). • Tense and voice confusions • Subject-verb agreements • Commas, colons, and semicolons Here are the most common problems of word usage: • Affect and effect • It’s and its • It/its and they/their • There and there and they’re • That, which, and who • Lie and lay • To, too, and two • Like and as • Who and whom, whose and who’s • Medium and media • Less and fewer One trick for cutting clutter is to read drafts backwards. Read the last section first, then the next-to-last section, all the way to the opening section. Backwards editing offers two benefits. First, it helps you avoid getting swept away by your own prose. Second, it helps you to envision the structure of your writing. Also search for instances of “to be” and “to have.” Those constructions usually obscure rather than clarify matters. 6. Do not get argumentative. You want to make your argument so compelling that even skeptics are eager to embrace and further your argument. If you are doing your job, people with other perspectives will see the merits of your case. You do not need to put down others’ arguments to make your own. Eagerly anticipate and present opposing arguments, not to just to counter them, but also to engage as broad a readership as possible. No matter how right you are, someone somewhere holds a different perspective with just as much validity. If you appreciate a different perspective, you will sharpen your own thinking. Whatever you write about will play out differently in different circumstances. We want to identify patterns that apply to different circumstances—but to do that, we need to be mindful of how things vary in different situations. We also need to understand how someone would see things differently. 7. Discuss issues with other people and read aloud. To be a good writer, you also need to be a good speaker. Speaking is just writing on air, at least in some ways. The better you speak, the better you can write. Writing is often understood as a solitary business. And, to be sure, we need to get away from the noise of everyday life to think through difficult problems and apply ourselves to writing. But you cannot flip the “social” switch all the time. You need to connect writing with other people. Writing is, after all, communication. In our modern age, we have radically separated important and related ways of thinking—writing and speaking, words and images, right and left sides of the brain, thinking and action. But if we want to do anything well, we need to work on all these skills. Speaking about issues gives you greater mental flexibility and confidence. Anyone can speak well, which gives you greater confidence. Speaking forces you to give your thoughts some kind of order. Speaking extemporaneously also taps into the deep reservoirs of knowledge that usually gets stuck below the surface of your consciousness. Reading drafts of writing aloud helps you imagine how readers will take in your words. Will they stumble? Will they get confused? Will they get lost? Will they understand your point? Will they visualize your ideas?
