Do you like writing? Do you do it for readers or for self-expression? Do you do it to communicate, entertain, teach, or your own fun? Has anyone told you you’re doing it wrong?
In today’s school systems, they teach you to write “A bold beginning, a mighty middle, and an excellent end.” They teach vocab words that you'll never use and they make you memorize Latin and Greek roots that might be useful if you're a linguistics professor. They teach you to preview a text and guess what it’ll say, then you're allowed to read it and see that you’re not psychic. They tell you to summarize key points and to circle words you don’t know. They load you up with poems and short stories too dry to entertain, too dense to understand. Then they ask you for symbolism when you can’t even describe *what* happened till you’ve read it ten times. They teach you to fill space on a page; they teach you to abuse thesauruses. They teach you to find academic criticism and they teach you the patience to muddle through the big words and poor ideas.
They don’t teach parts of speech (subject vs predicate or adverb vs adjective); they don’t diagram sentences; they don’t teach grammar till your mind is hardwired to say "I seen." How are you supposed to know the difference between a good sentence and a bad one? How are you supposed to make a good sentence? They don't teach you. So the top stories on Fanfiction.net and Wattpad read like plays with dialogue more boring than instant messaging between teenagers. "Hey. What's up? Nothing much, you? Same. Cool." Thousands of pages like that is bad enough but for the top rated, most popular stories to be that offensively bad is proof that no one has taught you the basics of good writing.
I’ll teach you.
This blog will feature lessons on language. I can’t teach you what to write beyond the archetypal plots that are tried and tested and a bit stale, but as Roger Ebert says, "I know, in fact, that what will happen next is completely predictable: They'll fight, they'll share experiences, they'll suffer together, and eventually they'll fall in love. I know all of these things, and yet I don't care. I don't care because love is always a cliché anyway, and the only thing that makes it endlessly fascinating is that the players are always changing." There are plots that have never been successfully explored and characters that seem impossible till presented properly. I can't tell you who or what to write about, but I can show you how sentences are better than others. Through practice and by following this advice, your writing, academic and creative, will improve.
I’ll include example sentences for you to improve upon and then show what I thought would spice it up. I’ll update every week with new lessons, but I’ll also include stories from around the internet that showcase poor writing. I’ll show you my edits and why, and you can compare my version to the original and you’ll see mine has more punch, visual appeal, characterization, and literary value.
Some of these lessons are not my own creations. I was taught by a great crank in a sweater vest, A.W. Johns, and he wrote a book my final year of college. These are lessons from his book, as well as my experience thrown in. His theories aren’t perfect and neither are mine. But they don’t force a style onto you; they give you a foundation for your style to build from.
If you’re not interested in learning, move on. If you want to critique my theories, go ahead. If you want to learn, keep reading. I’ll teach you what I can.
