10 Rules for Writing Well
And What Does It Even Mean to Write Well?
Despite what you learned in school, there’s more than one way to write well.
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I was devastated when my teacher handed back the essay. I’d spent so much time working on it, and now I sat at my desk wondering what went wrong. My dictionary and thesaurus were right beside me the whole time. There were long, flowery sentences sprinkled throughout. Surely, this was supposed to be an A+ paper?
Not even close, as it turned out. Looking back, it’s easy to understand why. I’d spent more time trying to sound smart than thinking about whether or not the essay was readable. My periphrastic verbiage and insipid treatise left her incontrovertibly nonplussed. In other words, I’d used a lot of fancy talk to say a bunch of nothing.
Writing isn’t about big fancy words. Sometimes it’s not even about following all the rules of grammar; it’s about communicating. Writing well means communicating well.
