Improving Writing Skills

PG's essay on writing says this too, this helps a lot

Reading what you wrote is a great teacher. You don't need to publish to do that. Make a review queue, put the article online but don't publish it.Every day review the article again. First review, you might find your expressions bland and enrich them. Second review you might end up realizing you skipped on an important point, etc.When the article is ready, publish online and try not to change it afterwards. Not being able to touch the final product gives a sense of urgency and hel

I am planning to learn how to write better. I am starting that by maintaining a stream of consciousness personal daily log. Also get more practice by commenting on Hacker News :)

"Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcut."

You speak faster than you write. Writing helps formulate your thoughts better and hence reduces the need for do overs.

writing is neat in that you can always go back and edit.just chunk out what you can and dont worry if it isnt up to your standard the first time around.fragmented concerted effort is better than no effort, every time.

I've found that the more I spend time on writing, the ideas that are being written about change in a way that generally coalesces into something better defined and of higher quality than just quickly writing down the initial form of the idea.Forcing one's self to write, forces more in-depth thinking about the topic, which can lead to surprising and unexpected revelations (which I would refer to as quality writing).One doesn't need to keep the journey, just publish the destin

Yes, it's a practiced habit.I found that when I first started writing regularly I would spend a lot of time doing constant editing similar to the example shown in the linked article. This would become distracting and time consuming, then I'd forget other things I had wanted to say. So I found it better, for me, to just kind of write things in my head first and then sit down and write -almost more transcribing vs. "writing".

> just write and then edit - better to have written something (even if it's not great) and then make it better.Related: Do not be precious about what you've written as you rewrite. "Kill your darlings", as the saying goes.https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-does-it-mean-to-ki...

I think this might be because rather than 'write how you talk', what you actually want to do is write how you would talk if you had time to say the best version of your thoughts. This means if you couldn't see yourself sitting down and saying the stuff you're writing to somebody, it's probably no good. If what you write doesn't have a natural flow when spoken from the tongue, it probably won't when people read it either.