You’ll change your mind about the content of your book as you’re writing it. But writing is an inefficient way to learn. You should start by meticulously planning, not writing, and you should reserve time for rewriting, too. There’s an efficient process that smart writers use and it looks like this: plan/write/revise/polish. I’ll explain. Writing…
It’s time to revise a previous draft — of a blog post, a report, a book chapter, or any factual content. You’re dealing with feedback from others, or maybe just your own better insights into what you wanted to say. Should you tinker with words — self-editing — or rewrite from scratch? How cognitive biases…
You did it, didn’t you. You wrote a nonfiction book (or most of one). Now you have 50,000, 70,000, maybe 100,000 words. And it’s a mess. You’re feeling desperate. You can’t start over — but how can you turn this mass of goop into something useful? Don’t despair. It’s not as bad as you think….
If you believe the Boston Globe or the Wall Street Journal, students are increasingly writing papers on their phones. While there are some benefits, teachers ought to discourage it, since it interferes with reflection and promotes a pernicious first-draft writing habit. The articles on this topic are anecdotal Like most trend pieces, both of these articles are…
In 2009, Ted Schadler and I had a problem. The back half of our book Empowered wasn’t working. This is how we fixed it. We were nearing the manuscript deadline for Empowered, Ted’s and my book about strategies to deal with empowered consumers and workers. The front half of the book, about consumers (and marketing), was holding together pretty…
For all my talk about writing, I’ve found that there’s only one way to get better. Practice. Write. Get feedback. Rewrite. Then write something else. Repeat as frequently as possible.