How to produce good writings? —— A Fantastic Blog

In Ann Handley’s blog, I read two passages: “9 qualities of good writing”, and “13 writing rules”. Both of them shows many high quality of writing rules for different levels of writers.

The first passage uses many examples and famous person to show that a good writing should be simple, systematic, logical, and comprehensive. Ann quoted George Orwell’s words: “ What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he or she will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?” Those were questions that George Orwell would ask himself in every sentence. It shows that every word in a good writing should be considered carefully.

First of all, as Ann mentioned: “ Good writing is grounded in data”. When we have something in mind before computers or a piece of paper, we should asked ourselves: “ Do I have enough facts to support my content?” Taking myself as an example, I often wrote many big concepts in my writing. However, I did not have much facts as data or researches to make them reliable. This made my essays easy to be broken. Therefore, rigorous essays, especially in TOEFL and SAT tests, must be like some graceful music with beautiful lyrics. Otherwise, the melodies would be boring and hollow without juicy.

Second of all, Ann also suggested that : “Good writing is like math”. I totally agree with it, because the best writings are those whose structures are systematic, and sentences have both simpleness and profundity. Readers should be able to understand the writers’ meaning without spending fifteen minutes on a single point. At the same time, the writer also need to rewrite the writings until his/her sentences can really catches the readers’ appetites.

These two passages contain many meaningful rules for the writers. As a student, I also learned a lot from it. Ann Handley not only taught me how to improve the writings’ quality, but also inspired me to be a better writer in her excellent and educational blog.