The first words you write are the first draft. Writing is thinking. You'll rarely know what exactly you want to say when you start writing.
The time you put into editing, reworking and refining turns your first draft into a second draft, and then into a third. If you keep refining it over days or weeks or even years, it eventually becomes something great.
Learning how to write an essay is a very difficult task. In school, it's often not taught in any systematic way. Students are left to either find their way by intuition or flounder. To address this problem, Jordan Peterson, a psychology professor at The University of Toronto, created a template for his students that takes them step by step through the detailed process of writing an essay.
When you write about your work, it makes all of us smarter for the effort, including you. Done well, this kind of sharing means you're contributing signal, instead of noise. But writers are made, not born. We often hear from people who say they'd love to write for A List Apart or start blogging, but don't know where to start.
Writing is intimidating. There’s this expectation of artful precision, mercurial grammatical rules, and the weird angst that comes with writing for other people. You start with a tidy nu...
Choosing the words to describe your work means you’re doing it on purpose.
You’re going on the record as someone who thinks about why they do what they do, and understands how each decision affects the results. And developing this knack for critical thinking will also make you better at what you do.
Stop and think about how many emails you write each day at work. According to a study conducted by Carleton University, professionals spend one-third of their time at work reading and answering emails. You might spend more than this, or less, but chances are, a significant portion of your day is spent writing something.