Kanha

Misba Reyaz

Naval

chris stanchak

Keith

Ryan Hoover

Nivi

hi airchat! i needed some advice on how to write better because im working on college essays this month and i need to learn how to write exceptionally. 

since there's already a room on how to speak better, i thought creating this would be very helpful. 



 I would suggest tweeting. Nothing will get your writing in 

 order as much as being constrained to 280 characters at a time.

 If you can't figure out how to say it in a few tweets, you're 

 just going to spend a lot of words to end up saying very little or 

 nothing because you don't understand what you're trying to say.

 I think, therefore, I am might be the most bang-for-the-buck sentence ever written.

 I'm not going to attempt to do the French version.

 Except it's wrong. I actually prefer the Buddha's three-word quip, desire is suffering.

 I think it's crazy that you can spend a whole lifetime or fill a 

 library just to try to get to the meaning of those three words. It's amazing.

Which subjects will you be writing for? Since you mentioned college, the evaluation may vary depending on the subject. So it’ll be harder for us to give you generic advice. ie. technical writing vs scientific writing vs colloquial writing 

 Thank you, Naval. In that case, what are some 

 things that I can do to get better at tweeting?

 Hey, so I'm writing college application essays, and most of the prompts are just person statement-like.

 story, my background, all of that stuff.

 So I want to know how to get good at telling your story in 

 a way that's authentic, but also memorable and captivating.

 very cliche what I'm going to say but if you

 want to get better at writing, the easiest thing is write every day,

 whatever you can, but just write and eventually you will start to understand

 your thoughts and organize your sentences better. It happens to me as

 was able to say things in a better way, to

 organize my thoughts more clearly, and it just comes through the practice and

 experience, so there is no easy way on this.

 There is an expression, it says that, I 

 forgot who said it, but write at least 500 words

 a day. And my scariest thing in the morning is 

 just working on my desk and my laptop, like every

 day I find millions of excuses not to approach the desk, but eventually I do.

 okay, you gotta do this, you can do this.

 And then it just comes naturally and that's it.

 Write more, you will become better at it.

 Hey Connor. Finally, something I know about. So, the trick to writing well is reading

 should read twice as much as you write. If you

 read all the time, you should write half as often as you read. Now, there are

 classics. John McPhee, for structuring story arrangement and many other things

 including concision, making things short. Although, don't get obsessed with

 that up front. You can always trim later and find your own style. And then, let's

 see, we've got the classics here are Zinsser for nonfiction. If you're a student,

 Writing to Learn, I think is excellent. This is a great example of terrific,

 bare-bones, gripping science writing by James Treffil. To be a good writer, you

 have to be a good reader. And then, since, I'm not sure if you're in technical

 field or not, but I think contemplations on the relationships between knowledge

 and writing and reading in language is really, really important. What I'm missing

 here is Stephen King's, something on writing or something like that. And then,

 there was an author that came out like, like a thousand blackbirds, Annie Lamott.

 And that's pretty inspirational. Don't go a single day without reading in your

 you want to write, don't go a single day.

 Just even 15 minutes, it's garbage. A description of, you know, I guess stop

 watching Netflix too. But if you want to be a writer, you gotta write. And you

 should, because I think when you write, you also, there's a continuity. It helps

 you, everything, you know, as above, so below, as within, so without. But it's an

 a writer when I was a kid, but I fell in

 love with math, so now I've done a bunch of 

 and accounting, so who knows what dreams may come.

 The English betrays us here. I think in modern English this is 

 better translated as grasping leads to unsatisfactoriness Morning

 Yeah, I'm gonna take the other side. If it's about just like crafting perfect paragraphs,

 maybe tweeting. But most literature isn't like that. And in particular, like, personal commentary

 and authenticity, like, sorry, there's not much authentic or there's not much authentic about

 Twitter. So I will hardcore take the other side 

 with the exception that tweeting is terrific for

 concision and polis, but it misses the point of 

 a reader along in a journey. Tweets just don't do that.

 And I forgot a good one. I think many people miss this because 

 they think it's like just, you know, rules for syntax and semantics.

 E.B. White does... it's such a great book and it's under the radar.

 So, also highly recommend. But if I had to 

 with one, I would definitely start with Zinsser.

 Writing is such a useful skill. So glad 

 exploring that. I used to write a lot. I still

 do a little bit, but not as much. I used 

 to publish hundreds of blog posts, you know,

 over the years. I'd go to Philz every morning 

 for one or two hours and then write before going to

 work. And it was just really helpful. I built a 

 lot of connections and, you know, became a better

 writer in doing so. Obviously, I think it's impossible to become a better writer just

 by thinking about it or reading about it. You have to just do it.

 But the thing that fewer people are talking about is getting feedback.

 So for me, writing is useful, but unless you 

 get the feedback from other people, smart people,

 on how you could have better worded something, or 

 you could have restructured your sentences or ideas,

 without that feedback, I think it's really hard to know how well you're doing,

 or at least see other ways of positioning your writing and your words.

 I used to have this, like, startup edition, is what we called it,

 this little community with Nathan Beshaw of other writers, mostly people in tech,

 who would be writing about their experiences.

 And before we published our blog post together, we'd share in this private group drafts,

 and we used a tool called DraftIn to do almost like diff-style edits,

 so people could suggest, oh, maybe you should change this word,

 or maybe you should shorten this sentence, or maybe you should rearrange it this way.

 It made me more aware of different ways of positioning things,

 but also just made my writing when I published much better.

 And also going to what Naval said, Twitter's also been a very useful tool in 

 collapsing thought and being more succinct and ultimately become a better writer as well.

 And on that note, actually, I think AirChat has a very 

 similar opportunity when it comes to speaking and communicating.

 And it's something I've been thinking about even before this chit.

 You know, maybe I should be using AirChat more 

 just so I can become a better communicator verbally.

 Different things work for different people. For me it was 

 reading. I just started to read a lot of books, a lot of books and 

 that reading helped me to build a strong foundation for writing.

 I can feel it that from where I have improved 

 myself in writing and for me it was reading, yeah.