StephWills.com

I was recently help­ing a friend edit his resume and he men­tioned that he’d appre­ci­ate some input on writ­ing bet­ter. Fol­low­ing is the advice I gave him. These are my steps to writ­ing better.

(Also: No, I won’t edit your resume.)

1. Read, read, read. Always be read­ing some­thing, even when you’re just killing time watch­ing TV. It’s the #1 rea­son I bought a Kin­dle — so I would read more. And I have. I’d esti­mate that I read prob­a­bly 50% more than I did pre-Kindle.
2. Read qual­ity shit. Give Me Some­thing To Read is a good place to start. Buy and use Instapa­per on your iPhone and use the book­marklets in your browser. Always be look­ing for some­thing to read. It’s why I’m going to spend $40 per year sub­scrib­ing to The Objec­tive Stan­dard and prob­a­bly another $40 for The New Yorker on my Kin­dle. The qual­ity of writ­ing is superb, regard­less of whether I agree with what’s writ­ten. The way it’s writ­ten is high qual­ity. Always choose qual­ity over quan­tity.
3. Buy Skrunk and White, The Ele­ments of Style ($9.95). Read it once a week for a month, then com­mit to skim­ming it once a month indef­i­nitely. You’ll be sur­prised at how stuff starts jump­ing out at you from the screen/page once you’re famil­iar with the basics.
4. Buy a style guide. The Chicago Man­ual of Style is the gen­er­ally accepted stan­dard for “stan­dard” pub­lish­ing, which should cover most busi­ness cases. There’s also the New York Times Man­ual of Style and Usage, but it’s in con­tention with the The Asso­ci­ated Press Style­book and both are gen­er­ally for jour­nal­ism. I pre­fer the NYT, but I’m a fuck­ing loon so take it for what it’s worth.
5. Read, read, read. Read your ass off. At any given time, you should be read­ing a book that makes you *think* and makes you *stretch* your men­tal com­fort zone. You should also, at the same time, be read­ing an easy book, some­thing that you can relax and zone out with.
6. Profit.

Tags: Writ­ing