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Writing Well April 4, 2009

It was on a lazy Sunday afternoon, a couple of months ago during the Chinese New Year, that I came across an article by Dzoff Azmi in the Star newspaper. He was relating his experience teaching people how to write a television script and two points stood out.

1) Writing is less about “free and open creativity” and more about “hard work and structure”.

2) Writing is easy, writing well is hard.

Dzoff’s argument to this is simple. Writing is essentially about conveying a point, but because the product is only as good as its producer, to write well the writer must do so in a way that is honest to himself/herself. And because of the level of passion in writing, there is always the danger of ‘falling in love with your own words’ enough to dilute a paragraph expressly to slot in a clever phrase.

Although I found Dzoff’s points spot-on, if it wasn’t for that publishing project that just passed, I wouldn’t have appreciated his points as much as I do now. Although it was far and few in between, the amendments undertaken to the drafts that came to my colleague and I (who were the coordinators) were nonetheless necessary. Even one word made a mountain of difference to the flow of the sentence, or in some cases, brought an angle to it. I was thoroughly pleased, and deeply disconcerted.

Pleased because I now have an appreciation for detail in corporate writing, which I find to be the driest form of communication out there. Ironic, since that is basically what I do, day in and day out – reports, memos, notes, minutes, etc. 

Disconcerted because while this appreciation for words is has been lacking in most of us in the office, my three younger colleagues – ones who are my brother’s age nonetheless, scholars of the insitution I work for and  graduates of London School of Economics and Warwick University – have been discriminate about, judging from the office conversation we had in the dead of the night as we consolidated our points. It certainly takes your ego down a notch or two when you learn something, not matter how intangible, from people with less than half your working experience.

So now, I pay more attention to the words I use, that depending on the rest of the sentence, give markedly different tones and therefore convey a whole new meaning i.e. ‘disbursement’ vs. ‘payment’, ‘it has come to our attention’ vs. ‘we understand’, ‘endorsement’ vs. ‘approval’. 

And I hope to translate that appreciation to my blogging too. It’ll certainly require more time and effort on my part and perhaps might mean lesser entries in between…save for the impromptu entires (like yesterday). So hope you’ll bear with me as I  begin my quest to write well.