MultipleĀ Hugo Award-winner andĀ Stargate Universe creative consultantĀ John Scalzi offersĀ ten writing tips for non-professional writers:
- Speak what you write.
- Punctuate, damn you.
- With sentences, shorter is better than longer.
- Learn to friggin’ spell.
- Don’t use words you don’t really know.
- Grammar matters, but not as much as anal grammar Nazis think it does.
- Front-load your point.
- Try to write well every single time you write.
- Read people who write well.
- When in doubt, simplify.
This, fromĀ Try to write well every single time you write:
I have friends who I know can write well who send me the most awful e-mail and IMs because they figure it doesn’t matter how many rules of grammar and spelling they stomp on because it’s just e-mail and IM. But if you actually want to be a better writer, you have to be a better writer every time you write. It won’t kill you to write a complete sentence in IM or e-mail, you know. The more you do it, the better you’ll get at it until it will actually be more difficult to write poorly in e-mail and IM than not.
viaĀ @finiteattention