Tips for Successful Writing

"The Science of Scientific Writing"

In this piece, Swan and Gopen make many points about writing, but a few of them stood out to me as ways that I could personally improve my writing, which is key. First off, they stressed the importance of clear, concise writing. The goal of writing is to make the reader understand and think about your piece, not to confuse them with foreign words and strange sentence pairings. The writer should always have his/her audience in mind when writing his piece, and never expect their reader to understand background knowledge. That is why the writer must give his/her audience ample context before starting the story so as to make everybody aware of where he/she is going before he/she actually starts. Furthermore, the natural flow of the piece must be, well, natural. It must make sense which way the story goes from start to finish. Every sentence should lead to the next seamlessly. The last point I really related to was the one about needing to spread out the plot from start to finish, rather than packing in all the exciting bits in the very beginning. After all, the lasting impression is often made just after reading the final few pages, which should be exciting and resolving. Only when the reader can fully understand every aspect of the work, can he/she fully appreciate the work.


"Politics and the English Language"

In this piece Orwell warns his audience not to fall into several common traps, which in turn hinder your writing as a whole. For example, he tells his audience that if they are trying to create successful work, rather than throwing in complicated words and dialect, it is more successful to use more common words that really mean what they are trying to say. Often times, students will just use a thesaurus to find what they think is more advanced, intelligent words to replace their simple one. Orwell would deffinitely object to this. To him, it is much more important to be clear and concise. Only then, he believes, can you fully develop your paper and convey your meaning to your audience, which is, after all, your biggest goal as a writer.