If You Can Think, You Can Write

If you can think, you can write. You can also read a lot of very long books about writing, and some of them are pretty good. As a professional editor, I have also read some very poor writing. The difference between good writers and mediocre ones is whether they organize their thoughts before they put pens to paper.

Writing is a learned skill, not something that you either can or cannot do. The distinction between people who seem to write easily and those who do not is more a matter of comfort, exposure, and just plain doing it. If your parents and early teachers played word games with you or encouraged you to read, you may be more at ease with language in spoken and written form. If you didn't have early exposure, you can create greater comfort with words for yourself.

There are two key factors for adults who want to learn to write well.

1) Don't be afraid to write badly while you learn.

2) Practice by writing about what you know

In school, you had to learn about a subject before you began to write (such as term papers in high school), and your grade depended on how well you learned it and expressed what you knew. I encourage you to write about topics with which you are already familiar. Thus, you will not struggle with unfamiliar facts or ideas. You can focus on how to put these ideas on paper. (I'll refer to what you write as an article, but you may think of it as an essay, practice-piece, or something else.)

Pick a topic. If a subject does not come immediately to mind think about what you like to

Read about
Talk about
Play

Yes, play. Do you like to play basketball or Yahtzee? Maybe the topic you pick will have to do with strategies for winning a game. Perhaps you enjoy giving gifts and work hard to select them. The important thing is to pick something you like and know a lot about. If it seems like a trivial topic...no problem! Be assured, there is no topic so mundane that someone has not written about it. Why not you?

There are three components every kind of writing has in common: a beginning, a middle, and an end. When writing is poorly organized, it is hard for the reader to tell the beginning from the middle. They always know the end; you have to hope they have not been praying for it. When you have selected your topic, think about what you want to say about it. If you selected a topic as broad as baseball, you need to narrow it down to something that can be described or discussed in just a few pages -- this is a practice lesson, not a guide for writing a reference book.

Once you have a specific topic, perhaps the most important consideration is who you expect to read your writing. Right now you may think you don't want anyone to read it. That's fine, but you need to define an audience even if you don't show your work to them. For example, if you do your own plumbing repairs and decide to write for the novice homeowner, your article will be vastly different than that of a technical writer preparing a segment for plumbers taking a refresher course for license renewal.

Putting Your Thoughts on Paper

Next, you need to jot down some of your ideas. That does not mean you need to form perfect sentences, or even that you know where the beginning, middle, and end of your article are just yet. Just write a list of things that cross your mind.

You are now at what I call the bottom of the 'idea pyramid.' You have a jumble of ideas. As you read these thoughts (which you may have jotted down over several days), you will start to see patterns -- ways of grouping similar ideas. For example, if you decided to write about developing a better golf swing, some of your ideas may have to do with how to hold the club, others with how you should stand, and others with where you would look as you actually do the swing. It is time to rewrite your list and group similar ideas together.

After you have done this you should see a more clear sense of direction for your article. Go back over your now better organized list and see if you want to add or delete some ideas. Remember, this does not need to be a neat list -- if you are doing it on paper there will surely be many scratch-offs and perhaps arrows moving an idea from its original part of the list to another group of ideas.

As you start to put these ideas together into paragraphs it is important to remember that it is okay to write awkwardly at first. You are doing this to learn. For now, do not think about spelling or grammar, just the flow of ideas. You are concentrating on substance over form. For more on writing your first draft, see my article on "Getting Ideas on Paper."