Below, Neal Allen and Anne Lamott share five key insights from their new book, Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences.
Neal had a 15-year career in journalism before spending 10 years as a corporate executive. Now, he is a spiritual coach. Anne has written 20 and a half books, several of which are New York Times bestsellers.
What’s the big idea?
Clear writing is rare—not because people lack ideas, but because they’ve never been taught how to express them. Instead, they try to sound impressive and lose their voice. Great writing that gets your point across memorably is about confidence, connection, and even a little fun.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Neal and Anne—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.
1. Nowadays, everybody’s a writer.
Most people used to communicate by speech: telephone calls with friends and relatives, in-person commands from bosses to their reports, the news on TV. Writing, when I grew up, was a specialized skill. That has all changed with email and texting.
Now, most work, friend, and family communication is in writing. In my youth, it wasn’t unusual for a CEO to be nearly illiterate, have terrible grammar, and ask others to write things out for them. In a world without spell check and online editors, written communication passed many eyes before being tossed into a wide audience. Not true anymore.
Anyone can go viral on any day now. And the expectation of getting your point across succinctly and well has never been higher. I love that everyone is writing and posting, telling their stories, and finding out who they are. It’s only good, for each person and for their family or community, because writing is good for the soul.
2. Grammar is boring.
We are not grammarians. Grammarly and other tools like it will soon fix everyone’s grammar. Making grammatical writing more persuasive isn’t like doing grammar. It can be fun. For one thing, there’s no right or wrong.
You aren’t going to be trolled for pumping up a sentence. If you delete a weak verb, like walked or liked, and replace it with a vivid word like trumped or embraced, then you’ll probably get more likes after getting your point across.
“You aren’t going to be trolled for pumping up a sentence.”
It is more fun for the writer to paint a clear picture in words, maybe even with flair or charm, as they communicate ideas, visuals, data, or memories. And it’s a pleasure and a relief for the reader to be presented with clear, easily understood sentences.
3. Some rules for persuasive writing are rules for life.
For conversations with friends, speeches to employees, political debates, emails, and texts—all communication—take out the boring stuff. You don’t always have to explain yourself. And you might want to respect your audience’s hope for brevity and novelty. That’s what we want. Short and fun. That’s what the human mind has always wanted.
If you can deliver a complicated message in short and fun segments, you can keep anyone’s attention forever. Clear, clean expression can be rare, and the recipient of our best efforts to share stories or information is blessed by our caring enough to get it right. To develop ourselves as people committed to the craft of communication through words gives us the tools of habit, practice, and courage. Who knows where these will take us?
4. Writing is more collaborative than you think.
Even if you’ve always thought it was up to you to get things done, you’ll reach a point when you need others in the room. The best writers in the world share their work and ask for constructive criticism, regularly and openly. In writing, you can’t bury mistakes. They’re digitally stored forever. We absolutely need and deserve respectful feedback in our undertakings.
“The best writers in the world share their work and ask for constructive criticism, regularly and openly.”
As children, we were taught to keep our eyes on our own pages and compete to be the best, but the joy of working with someone—a writing buddy, a collective or writing group, and eventually maybe an editor—is one of writing’s great gifts. It’s wonderful to find someone who cares about your work and wants to help you be the very best you can be, as you will do the same for them. Writing and life can be lonely without respectful and fun companionship. Other people’s eyes on our work saves us from ourselves.
5. Even if you don’t like writing, just do it.
No one cares whether your first version is crappy. All it needs is a framework and some key points and all the stuff in between. The point is to get the project going. You’ll find your way as you go. Whether it’s a little bit of writing or a lot of writing, just set it down first and worry about its wording later. Wanting it to go smoothly from the start ends in procrastination. Spill it out recklessly at first and then rein it in later. The world wants your ideas, your energy, your heart.
The water is cold when you first get in, but if you keep your butt in the chair and keep flailing, something magical happens. You start to like it. You warm up, you find your rhythm, you find the excitement of going a little bit farther out and then a little farther. When you get back to shore and step out of the water, you’re a bit different than when you got in. There’s a feeling of freshness and accomplishment, like you’re doing what you were meant to be doing all along.
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