Write as you want to be heard
If you have ever chatted with me in real life, you know that my writing style here closely reflects my speaking manner. My writing, just like my speaking, is labyrinthine and circuitous. Like a bad DFW knockoff, I manage to digress from my digressions. Sometimes it takes me minutes at a time to find my way back to what I was trying to say.
While you can debate the novelty of my writing, you cannot, in good faith, decry its earnestness. Even this post, like so many others before it, is not a laboriously manicured artifact but a rough copy edit of a transcription of a voice memo I recorded while walking my dog — the outline of which I formed in my head fifteen minutes prior as I put Lucy down to sleep.
This has good parts and bad. One good part is that perhaps more than anything else, it communicates not just the topic at hand but my overall shtick: sometimes generally, sometimes fractally. And in doing so, I sacrifice — both deliberately and out of laziness — the things that make for great writing in other disciplines: brevity, concision, citation. My essays are neither terse nor focused; if the goal of a piece of writing is to communicate its ideas as succinctly and powerfully as it can, then I very rarely meet that bar.
But while that is the goal of some writing, it is not the role of all. And certainly not the vast majority of mine. I write because it is fun to use language; I write because it is a form of thinking; I write in order to communicate with others — and that is ordered in descending priority, at least as it pertains to jmduke.com.
I do not purport to ascribe my idiosyncrasies onto you; your goals and voice are different than mine; my point is just that my style fits the goals of my writing, which is to have some fun. What if you have different (i.e. normal) goals? I recommend two tactical things:
- I'm stealing this from my friend Harrison, who is smarter than I am: ask yourself when writing something, is the point of this piece of writing to communicate the journey or the destination?
- No matter what, the advice I got from a fourth grade teacher is still the best advice I've ever received — read aloud what you've written and see how it sounds. Not just to write as you speak, but to speak as you've written.