At the time of writing, I’m 19 years old and I have written more essays than I could bear to count. Throughout school, writing essays was a near-constant task, and now I write them for this website as well. Although not everyone enjoys writing essays, writing is an important skill.
We all write. Each day, we write hundreds–if not thousands–of words. Whether we are writing emails to our co-workers and peers, text messages to our friends, captivating captions on our Instagram posts, or essays for a class, writing is a universal skill that requires effort and dedication. Due to writing’s ubiquity, slight improvements can have massive benefits. We can impress our potential employers and current bosses, be more interesting online, and communicate better with our friends and classmates. Writing. Is. Everywhere.
For these reasons, I have been cultivating my own passion and skill for writing, especially writing essays. It was even one of the main reasons I started this website. Over the past year, I’ve been gathering resources to improve my writing and here I’ve chosen a handful of tips I found to be the most helpful. While this article is mostly directed towards essay writing, it can also boost your writing in all formats.
1. Have a Purpose
Every essay has a purpose. Sometimes, we are given a prompt that defines the purpose for us. Other times, it is not so clear-cut.
In 1580, the first collection of essays ever published was by a French nobleman named Michel de Montaigne. Inventing the essay form as a way to communicate more directly with the reader than through poetry or psalm, Montaigne explored a variety of topics through his writing. These topics ranged from friendship to facts about thumbs to the French education system. However, for each essay, he had some kind of purpose. In “On Democritus and Heraclitus”, Montaigne explains his method:
Our power of judgement is a tool to be used on all subjects; it can be applied anywhere. That is why I seize on any sort of occasion for employing it in the assays I am making of it here. If it concerns a subject which I do not understand at all, that is the very reason why I assay my judgement on it; I sound out the ford from a safe distance: if I find I would be out of my depth, then I stick to the bank: the realization that I cannot get further across is one effect of its action; indeed, it is the effect that judgement is especially proud of. Sometimes, when the subject is trivial and vain, I assay whether my judgement can find anything substantial in it, anything to shore it up and support it. Sometimes I employ it on some elevated, well-trodden subject where it can discover nothing new, since the path is so well beaten that our judgement can only follow in another’s tracks. In that case it plays its role by selecting what appears the best route: out of hundreds of paths it says this one or that one is the best to choose.
Michel de Montaigne
When developing the purpose for a more creative essay, we can meander from idea to idea, searching for a good topic to write about. But, once we have settled upon the one topic, focus is paramount. There is an infinite number of subjects to write about, but when we begin to stray from our chosen topic, we lose clarity and the quality quickly decreases. This is not to say the purpose of an essay cannot change or transform over time as we develop our thoughts, but we should ensure the final product has a clear vision.
2. Draw from Variety
Formulating an argument is like building a sturdy stool. If we build the stool with only one leg, it will be easy to knock over. Instead, when we carefully construct the stool with multiple legs that support each other, it becomes nearly impossible to knock over. Like the stool, our arguments require multiple resources to support it.
This is one of the main reasons why most of the essays we are assigned in school have minimum resource requirements for the bibliography. When we collect, organise, and connect ideas and facts from different sources, we can make a much more convincing argument. Gathering resources from as wide a variety as possible is beneficial, but we shouldn’t get carried away (See Number 5). Always ensure that despite being from multiple origins, all of our resources should relate back to our argument and support it.
One quote that I think fits this idea well is from the wise, old Uncle Iroh from the show “Avatar: The Last Airbender”, where he says, “It is important to draw wisdom from different places. If you take it from only one place it becomes rigid and stale”.
3. No Blank Pages
Starting to write something is the most difficult part. It’s a blank page. Word count: 0. You have lots of thoughts about what you might write, but putting those first words on a blank page can be an absolute struggle. This section is derived from the last, but whenever you sit down to write, you should never be starting with a truly blank page.
So how do you ensure you never start with a blank page? Twyla Tharp suggested that “reading, conversation, environment, culture, heroes, mentors, nature–all are lottery tickets for creativity. Scratch away at one of them and you’ll find out how big a prize you’ve won.” In this way, gather ideas from anything and use it as a starting point for writing. Whether it is a tweet from an interesting person, a book you read last month, an article that inspired you, or a conversation that made you reflect on life, all of it can be material to help you start.
Instead of starting with a blank page, start with a lot of notes. You can then rearrange those notes to be more coherent, and now you have a structure to work with and start filling out. The process is not simple, but it will make writing much easier than trying to start from nothing.
4. Go for a Walk
You have all of these amazing ideas swirling around in your mind, but you’re not ready to start yet. They haven’t had the chance to percolate, connect, and sit properly for you to make a strong, coherent essay. The best remedy for this is to take a walk or other exercise, like running.
Some of the most esteemed authors and thinkers have noted how essential physical activity, like running or walking, is for the daily routine and for thinking. During their activity, not only do they have better circulation of blood to the body and brain, but the focus we enter when active can have a meditative effect. In this state, our thoughts have a chance to run their full course without the interruption of other things. Our focus is to move, giving our minds room to think.
Next time you have to write, take the time to go for a walk. Bringing someone else along can also be just as beneficial. Often during my first semester at university I would go for walks with my father. Sometimes, we would walk in silence, and I would have time to think about my essays. Other times, I would try to explain my thinking about what I was researching for the prompt. Expressing my thoughts to someone would greatly aid in testing how well I knew the topic and what ideas supported my argument best.
Either way, just go move and let your mind run wild.
5. Be Concise
In high school, we often aim to sound smart for our teachers. If we used more eloquent vocabulary and filled our paragraphs with facts and statistics, we could get a couple extra points on that essay. The problem is that trying to sound smart often ends up hurting the clarity of our writing. If someone is unable to understand the pedantic words you got from Thesaurus.com, that’s bad. Or if your paragraphs are so full of numbers and statistics it becomes difficult to understand what you’re proving, that’s also bad. Instead, it’s best to be concise in both areas.
Forget the “More synonyms” function on Microsoft Word. The main reason you should ever need to use a thesaurus is to prevent lots of repetition in your writing. For example, if you are writing about how a book made an argument, you might need a lot of synonyms for “communicate” so that you aren’t continuously repeating yourself. However, for clear and effective writing, using a word like “exorbitant” just to replace “large” where it doesn’t fit the context is completely unnecessary. Believe me, it doesn’t matter how eloquent your vocabulary is if you do a great job at building your argument.
Let’s return to the stool analogy for building an essay. While a stool is strongest when it has several well constructed legs, it is important to also remove any dead weight. If there is a leg of the stool that doesn’t support the other legs very well and just dangles on the side, it should be removed. It may even hurt your argument and topple it over. So, what can you do? Once you’ve gathered all of your resources and taken notes, go back through and start to prune back to the most essential details. Then, if needed, add a couple extra flourishes, but ensure they always contribute to your central argument. It takes time, but the payoff can be the difference between a good and great essay.
Personally, this part is the most difficult for me to master since it requires the most effort and practice.
6. Write Often
The artist Henri Matisse would often sketch and paint hundreds of variations of the same piece of artwork. Many of them would never see the light of day. In the end though was a collection of masterpieces. On the other hand, Pablo Picasso created over 50,000 artworks and it’s estimated he painted a new piece of art each day. Every day, for over 80 years, he created something new. While we may never need to write at the same calibre as Matisse and Picasso made their artwork, the repetition and practice of writing regularly can pay off.
Often when trying to improve on creating things, quantity matters much more than quality. Getting practice from writing lots of mediocre essays or stories can make the ones that count so much better than only writing a single essay. There’s an analogy of a pottery class that is fitting. Half of the students in the class are told to make the single best pot they can make in one month. The other half of the students are told to make 30 pots in the same amount of time. At the end of the month, the students who made more pots ended the month with better quality pots than the students who focussed all of their energy on one pot.
I only post longer form essays every so often on this website, like “An Icy, Apocalyptic Story: Svalbard” or “Should You Buy a Kindle? 10 Considerations”. But, in my jumble of note-taking apps, I write on a semi-regular basis. Sometimes, they are just thoughts or ideas. Other times I take notes from something and add my own spin or summary. They are like little “pots” here and there to continue practicing.
Write often, and watch your writing get better over time.
For more tips, some of the best advice for writing I read was from David Perell, Nat Eliason, and Tiago Forte.