Writing Productivity Tip #8: Balance Patience and Urgency The hardest part of the revision process is knowing when you’re done. Patience is your friend, to a point. If a deadline looms, do what you can quickly and let it go. But when you have time, you must decide: how long do you keep revising? Brilliance, humor, pithy observations – much of […]
Writing
Writing: Learning to Love Your Quirks
Writing Productivity Tip #7: Work Your Quirks We’ve all got writing quirks and mannerisms. Writing quirks include grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, or little things you do that readers could find annoying. For example: While writing quickly, you make the wrong choice between its and it’s, or your and you’re. Awkward sentences suddenly appear in your drafts like unwelcome houseguests. You […]
Revision Is All About the Reader
Writing Productivity Tip #6: Revise for the Reader’s Productivity The previous posts in this series have been about finding ways write more fluidly and easily. The revision process is your chance to extend this same courtesy to the reader. Put in the effort to make the experience of reading as fluid as possible. It’s a matter of scalability. There’s […]
Writing: Rest Before Revising
Writing Productivity Tip #5: Give the Draft Room to Breathe You’ve dismissed the inner editor and created the first draft of your blog post, report, book chapter, whatever. You’re on a roll – what next? Now walk away. Give it some breathing room. Writing and revising are separate disciplines, and don’t work well when they crowd […]
Write for Flow, Not Perfection
Writing Productivity Tip #4: Give Your Inner Editor the Day Off You’re ready to start drafting something – a blog post, report, short story, or chapter of a nonfiction book. Do you write swiftly and efficiently? Or do you spend time struggling over word choice and sentence structure? The best possible case is to achieve a state of […]
Persistence – The Essential Writing Practice
Writing Productivity Tip #3: Welcome the Bad Days. Really. Even the most productive writers have days when things don’t go well: You’re too busy with other things to write. You don’t feel well. There’s something else you’d rather do – anything else, in fact. Writing feels like beating your head against a wall. Everything that comes out is terrible. You’ve […]
