How to Write About Anything: Excerpts

(Thought-Random)

  

        Great writers are always great readers.  Learning how to be an active, engaged reader helps you to become an effective and persuasive writer.   On reading a piece of terrible, even ridiculous writing,  you would most naturally recognize it to be such.  You'd usually even be hard pressed to explain why the writing is bad and what could be done to make it better. So when you can recognize and understand what makes writing good or bad, then you can use that knowledge to produce strong and effective writing of your own.

        Successful writing depends on insightful reading, careful research, and rigorous analytical reading.  Successful writing requires you to develop active-analytical strategies (as opposed to passive-receptive reading).  By reading novels and short stories,  you get to learn how passive reading turns you to a simple receiver of whatever text has to offer ( empirical information, emotional pleasure) while active insightful reading empowers you to more effectively evaluate and interpret the meaning of what you read making you a better writer in the process.

        Examining the characteristics of powerful, persuasive prose gets you to learning how to adapt and incorporate those strategies into your own writing.  The essay is perhaps the richest and most varied genre for studying the characteristics of a good argument.

       Writing, when it is well done, is never just words on a page - good writing invites interaction.  The reader engages with the words, interacts with the language and the ideas of the author.

       An increased ability to recognize good writing, thus,  is an increased ability to produce powerful writing yourself.



From Professor Dorsey Armstrong