Three Pillars of Great Writing

There are thousands of rules you can follow to be a good writer, but what does it take to be a great writer? A great writer focuses mainly on these three things: precision, organization, and variety. Writing is not a simple activity, no matter what method you choose to use. However, these three principal aspects of writing work together to create a natural flow, which will enable you to express your thoughts to your satisfaction.

Precision in writing is the ability to express exactly what you mean. It is important to convey each idea in its purest form, via the most precise language possible. Be neither so specific as to miss the big picture, nor so broad that significant details are ignored. Don’t assume too often that the reader will pick up on what you’re saying without a full, detailed explanation. Sometimes the extra information is redundant, but sometimes it is integral to the audience’s understanding. If you are going for a particular effect on the audience, you need to always, always keep the audience’s perspective in mind. Do not be only a writer, but also a thorough critic of your own writing. If it was someone else’s work, would it make sense to you? Or would it make sense only if you fill in some blanks?

The only way it is possible to write precisely is if you are writing *passionately.* Admit it: if you’re not having fun, your writing will be ordinary, dull, and pointedly imprecise. It will lack the quality of which you are capable. In short, it will suck. Your words reflect the tone of your thoughts, so if your main thought is of getting it over with and doing something else, the quality of your writing will suffer. Do you think, for instance, that Henry David Thoreau created Walden when he wasn’t really in the mood to write? Of course not, and that’s one of the main reasons why it appealed – and, to this day, still appeals – to so many readers. Thoreau offered the essence of his “spirit,” if you will, through passionate writing about nature and life in general, not through a misguided sense of duty or obligation.

If it helps, pretend that you are on your deathbed, speaking your last words. The last should be as good as the first, and as good as everything between, should they not? Give them strength. Give them meaning. Make them matter. Express it exactly as you feel it, with the clarity and precision of a man/woman who knows that these are the words worthy of summing up years of human experience – the joy, the pain, and every shade of gray. In every human mind, there is a core of unique intellectual and emotional understandings. Let your voice do justice to that core.

Good organization, another pillar on which a great writer stands, is all about connecting your ideas like the links of a chain. Your writing will sound best if it flows collectively as one long, logical train of thought, like a good piece of music, not as a disjointed series of vaguely related subjects. Forget what any teacher has told you about formal “transitions.” If you’re adding a transition merely because you don’t know any other way to introduce your next point, you are losing your natural flow, and you probably won’t be satisfied with that piece of writing as a whole. Instead of thinking about what “has” to come next, think about what you want to come next. If you can’t find any way to reach that second point without including a bland transition, think of a new point to add in between, which will connect the first and second major points. Or, change the second point entirely to something that you find more suitable and enjoyable. The point is to have fun explaining something that matters to you, not to torture yourself with standard formats that are incompatible with your personal style.

If you’re writing formally, there should be one central idea, and this idea should be reflected in some manner in every sentence. But when it comes to informal writing, you can go ahead and fly off on any tangent you please. This helps when you are forming any significant idea at all, regardless of whether it will ever develop into a full-blown essay, research paper, or the like. It also helps when you are planning formal writing. This “informal writing” is also known as stream of consciousness writing (here is a site that describes the uses of this style of writing, makes suggestions on how you might carry out this process, and clears up some of the initial confusions that a person who has never written in this style might have, and all in a concise manner: http://www.essortment.com/all/streamconscious_rbwd.htm ). In order to reach an important idea, some spontaneous exploration is necessary. Any mundane thought can be transformed into something deeper, something worth writing about.

Variety, the third and final of the three most important aspects of writing, is the opposite of monotony. If you use the same adjectives, verbs, sentence structures, etc. repeatedly, you are a monotonous writer. On the other hand, if you constantly make an effort to use the words that sound best and most appropriate to you, not just any old words that happen to convey the general (not the specific) meaning that you wish to communicate, you are on your way to becoming a better writer. In order to expand your knowledge of and access to various words and writing structures, you need to be an avid reader. You can read almost anything and encounter new words, connotations, stylistic approaches, and much more. When you read, you are picking up the tools that you will use in your own writing. Variety for variety’s sake can be harmful to your writing (replacing a common word with a more sophisticated one, despite being unaware of the connotations and exact definition of that more sophisticated term), but if you learn to integrate these various words, techniques, etc. in the appropriate manner, your writing will improve drastically.

My strengths in writing are, in short, all of the above. When I follow my own rules, I write well. I try to explain myself clearly, piece everything together with grace and logic, and include various styles (that last is not always done in a single piece of writing, but often in a series of writings, each with its own style). My weaknesses, in general, are the failure to live up to these standards at certain times, by falling short of a full, clear explanation where one is required; by attaching one idea to another without making it clear what the correlation is, why I am moving in that direction, or what my purpose is in a broader sense; and by using common, mundane words, sentence structures, or styles when I am capable of finding something more creative and meaningful to take their place. Grammar is not a great problem for me, but I do sometimes make mistakes (whether they are due to an ignorance of the correct way of expressing something, or merely to writing/typing too quickly).