Take the Bad Out of Writing

I’ve spent years in the writing business— helping writers publish and write books; mentoring the creation of website content, writing marketing proposals; teaching college level English; scrambling through an MFA in writing, and ghostwriting books for clients.

The most common problem, which I hear uttered by the masses, and which wins the best I-hate-myself-award, boils down to this: I can’t write. I suck. I was never good in English.

We love beating ourselves up.

This despair about the language arts smacks of the original sin.

When it comes to putting pen to paper or surrendering to the click of the keyboard, people’s self image of themselves as bad writers is an Academy Award winning horror movie.

And that’s the problem.

We're not bad writers, but we think so.

The average citizen clings to this belief, such that American corporations spend billions a year offering professional development courses on effective communication skills.

Less than a decade ago, the National Commission on Writing surveyed 120 major corporations, in addition to many of the nation’s colleges and universities. Writing is the “threshold skill for hiring and promotion” they concluded—a ticket to professional opportunity—while poor writing skills are the “figurative kiss of death.”

A number of corporate executives, who responded from the survey complained about poorly written emails and the lack of coherence in inter-office missives. “You might do a spell-check,” one respondent wrote, “but you can’t do a ‘thought-check.’”

The report found that fixing writing deficiencies costs American corporations nearly $3.1 billion annually in remedial on-the-job writing training.

The Writing Commission states it bluntly: “We are in a writing crises and nothing short of a “writing revolution” will save us.”

While the report is now dated, those conditions still prevail in our institutions and businesses at a time when strong writing skills are in demand across every professional field.

As colleges and universities create well-meaning interventions to address the growing percentage of remedial writers, and close the equity gap across the curriculum, this is a circumstance that can be remedied with one assist:

We need to stop problematizing the craft of writing, and start advancing a strategy that teaches students (and the rest of us) how to think like writers, while disregarding the notion that negative reinforcement drives learning.

Writing Instruction Rooted in a Culture of Error

Many believe that you must learn to write by focusing on error. This school of thought says: analyze error, determine faulty patterns, correct your grammar, and you'll be good to go.

Sound familiar?

You remember all the marks on your English papers? The obscure comments? The unclear teacher input in the margins? And, always, the red pen.

Without question, many editors and writing instructors benefit from a careful analysis of a given work. It’s common sense. You want to understand what’s not working. You need to determine the flaws in the content. Most seasoned writers understand this. The thinking goes like this: If you address error, then the content will improve.

But, when you’re in the growth stage of your writing life, you need a different kind of intervention, one that is not focused on error, but on prescription.

Words have a Powerful Effect

Perhaps it’s a matter of semantics, but intention has a powerful effect, both in life, and on the page.

If you focus on error, then, logically, that's where you focus your growth. My writing is full of errors, so I have to fix it.

When you guide novice writers through this type writing instruction, and your pedagogy of choice is dominated by error, then students learn to examine what’s broken, instead of how to make their content work better.

Thousands of students and reams of adult professionals have said to me over the years: My writing is damaged goods, because that’s all I've ever learned.

No one has ever said to me: “I just need to take an objective look at my development, and figure out how to get this moving in the right direction. I want to increase the depth and the relationships of my content patterns. I want to keep asking “why” and “how” until my logic clicks, and I reach my audience with a solid architectural design.

Look Forward Instead of Backward

If you focus on where you need to go, instead of focusing on flaws in your content, then your revision strategies will become more productive. You become less invested in the mistakes and more invested in the process.

When that happens, you begin to think more like a writer, where you focus on your ideas, and the most effective strategies to deliver those ideas.

Writing is not baking a cake, or solving a math problem, or fixing a flat tire. It’s an investment in the totality of your being, one that requires you to show up and make something happen.

Not focus on what’s wrong.