How did you improve your writing abilities?

[Elanti]

Hello all,

 

I know that graduate school is a great way to improve your writing abilities, but I was wondering if anyone knew of any books or materials I could study this summer before I enroll. 

[danieleWrites]

Two things:

1. Start reading scholarly journals in your field. American Journal of Psychology, not Psychology Today!

2. Write. A lot. If you can, find an online forum where you can hold written conversations with people advanced in the field. I like to hang around sociology blogs written by sociologists.

Well, three:

3. There are some basic composition books that can guide you, like William Zinnser's On Writing Well or Joseph Williams' Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace.

The big thing is that writing is like speaking and walking and country line dancing. The more you do it, the better you get at it. The less you do it, the worse you get at it. And, like country line dancing, doing writing (or dancing) in a different field (or style, say, a the tango) will help your writing (or dancing) ability overall, but it won't necessarily improve writing in your discipline (dancing the country line dance) since you still have to learn the conventions and expectations (the dance steps) involved in your discipline's writing (country line dancing). I think the metaphor ran a bit long.

[Between Fields]

Two things:

1. Start reading scholarly journals in your field. American Journal of Psychology, not Psychology Today!

2. Write. A lot. If you can, find an online forum where you can hold written conversations with people advanced in the field. I like to hang around sociology blogs written by sociologists.

Well, three:

3. There are some basic composition books that can guide you, like William Zinnser's On Writing Well or Joseph Williams' Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace.

The big thing is that writing is like speaking and walking and country line dancing. The more you do it, the better you get at it. The less you do it, the worse you get at it. And, like country line dancing, doing writing (or dancing) in a different field (or style, say, a the tango) will help your writing (or dancing) ability overall, but it won't necessarily improve writing in your discipline (dancing the country line dance) since you still have to learn the conventions and expectations (the dance steps) involved in your discipline's writing (country line dancing). I think the metaphor ran a bit long.

 

Exactly. I teach composition and this is what I tell my students. Write everyday. It doesn't have to be anything in your field, just write something. Guidebooks can help, but there's a lot of evidence out there that says direct grammar and style instruction are not really transferable (in a classroom setting), but if you write a lot and use those books to edit your writing, you may eventually pick up on your own idiosyncrasies and learn to compensate for them.

[victorydance]

I agree that practising your writing frequently will lead to improving it generally. But I also feel that you need to get your writing edited by someone else (especially someone who is trained and/or a good writer) to really understand and exponentially improve your writing. Seeing how other qualified people critique and fix your writing is a good system for understanding how to improve your own.

 

Secondly, revising is a process that a lot of people really skimp out on. 80% of writing is revision. If you haven't revised your writing more than 3 or 4 times when you 'finish' a composition then you are doing it wrong. 

 

Professional writers don't bust out perfect compositions in one or two goes. Many have revised their writing upwards of a few dozen times before something is complete.

[jayem]

I feel like the best way to improve your writing (if it is science-related) is to continuously read academic journal articles. This way, you absorb the flow of the papers while you educate yourself on current studies at the same time!

[Guest |||]

Read + Write x Time.

Edited March 30, 2014 by |||

[Guest Gnome Chomsky]

Hiring a different person to write my papers.

[Academicat]

If you can, find Wendy Laura Belcher's Book Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks in your library. She give some terrific advice and scaffolding for producing scholarly writing. Echoing what everybody (without a budget for hiring personal writers) has said, one of the harder parts of writing is putting pen to paper and getting started, so the more you write, the better you'll become. Read lots, write lots, and find honest readers to give you feedback.

Edited April 1, 2014 by Academicat

[danieleWrites]

Exactly. I teach composition and this is what I tell my students. Write everyday. It doesn't have to be anything in your field, just write something. Guidebooks can help, but there's a lot of evidence out there that says direct grammar and style instruction are not really transferable (in a classroom setting), but if you write a lot and use those books to edit your writing, you may eventually pick up on your own idiosyncrasies and learn to compensate for them.

You might find Ken Hyland's Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interactions in Academic Writing, 2004, of interest. He did a corpus analysis of various disciplines (via computer) to analyze how the different disciplines construct their texts. Sociology has an average of 107 in-text citations per paper while Physics has 12. I so totally geek this stuff.

[clinicalpsychphd20]

You read 100 pages of scholarly work daily (outside of your required class reading) and write ~1 page of scholarly work daily. Like everyone else here said, practice makes perfect.