Write to Express, Not to Impress
“Thesaurus carpet-bombings and long-winded sentences are commonly mistaken for fine writing because they feel authoritative and intellectual.
But they’re just masks; effective writing is lean, clean, and easy to read.”
— Gregory Ciotti
Ciotti adds that the root of the problem lies in our desire to impress.
He’s probably right. I wasted the first two years of my blogging journey trying to impress my audience even though I wasn’t a native English speaker.
I learned most of my English in high school. And if you’ve ever taken a high school English class, you probably had to meet those word counts on papers. Add to that the pressure to satisfy your teacher’s demands by adding extra adjectives to “enrich your writing.”
Sophisticated writing is good writing, I learned from those academics.
Applying complex high school writing to Internet blogging didn’t work, though. I’m not sure how many posts I deleted during those two years, but I was never going to be a writer. Blaming my teachers didn’t help, nor did imposter syndrome or playing the victim of not being an English native.
