How to fix 5 of the more common writing issues you might be experiencing
A story of indifferent schooling and social pressure.
Welcome back to the Writers Secret Weapon. I’m John, and I’m here to help you write better. This is the newsletter for people who actually want to improve their writing, and not just play the reindeer games of fiddling with headlines and optimizing their social connectivity.
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When I was in my second second year of college (I had failed out of my first college and was at a second college I hadn’t failed out of yet either), there was a Philosophy of Language class I took first thing in the morning. On the schedule, the class was supposed to be seventy-five minutes on Tuesdays and Fridays, but on our first day we were told that the schedule was wrong and it was a two-hour long, three-day-a-week seminar. This gave most of the students instant scheduling conflicts, and I remember a lot of grumbling from people who were eager to race to the admissions building to sign whatever paperwork was needed to drop the class.
Most of my classes were in the afternoon, so I didn’t have anything to do, and I was frequently either not completely sober or entirely preoccupied with trying to sleep with classmates to really be upset, so when 70% of the class bailed, I was one of the few people who stuck around.
It wasn’t a bad class, though the professor was really disinterested in two-way communication, so she’d ask not-rhetorical questions and when someone would answer, she’d take a minute or two to yell at them for interrupting her or derailing her train of thought.
At this point I was a few years older than most of the college sophomores in the class and I still had a number of chips on my shoulders so I would frequently ask her to back off or quit yelling at a kid (I was maybe 2 years older than most everyone else, I was still a dumb-as-a-stick kid too), which she did, but I got a lot of glares and my papers always seem to had a few more comments and notes on them compared to everyone else’s.
We didn’t hate each other, I’m sure she was a really tolerable person when she wasn’t in a classroom, but we never really saw eye to eye on anything. And although I did fail out of that school by the end of that year, I did pass her class, which has always stuck out to me. I failed a lot of classes that year out of disinterest, out of a lack of feeling like anyone really gave a shit that I wanted to learn something and not just have information thrown at me so I could regurgitate it, but I liked that at least for a few hours a week, I had a combative interaction with a teacher who would frequently use her ongoing divorce and her shitty ex-husband as examples in class.
Note: I would later take a class taught by her ex-husband and it was one the best classes I ever had in any college ever.
I’m bringing her up because she was the first professor I ever had who not only talked about her actual life as a teaching tool, but because she would title all her lectures and presentations with big dramatic titles like “Here’s Why Cursing Fucking Upsets People” or “The Way We Teach Children To Read Assumes Children Are Stupid” or “26 Reasons The Alphabet Is A Social Construct.” That’s stuck with me for the last twenty-plus years.
Any way, here’s what we’re talking about today.
I don’t know if you’ve definitely got any of these problems going on - I wouldn’t know specifically without reading something you’ve written. (You know you can have me do that, for free, right?) But I’m willing to bet that you’ve got at least one of these things happening somewhere in that manuscript of yours, because they’re really common.
Thankfully, these problems are also really fixable, though you’d never know that by looking at the “writing advice” floating around in tweets and posts and hashtags.
Here now are 5 problems, 5 quick little mentions of discussions of them, and 5 solutions.
I hope you find this helpful.
So what do we think about this format? Liking it? Tolerating it? Hate it with a passion? Let me know.
See you next week for more writing help. Love you. Talk soon.