How to become Wordsmith

 

A great storyteller is a wordsmith.

A wordsmith is always shaping words for the greatest effect. A storyteller chooses words for peak effect, crafts word pictures, and plans her words. A storyteller uses the techniques of good writing.

Contrary to common belief, great communication is NOT about fancy language and big words.

Composing communication is like weeding a garden. You want to strip back all the non-essentials and expose your ideas to the clear light of day. The best communicators in the world are uncommonly good editors.

William Zinsser was famous for helping writers clean up their work. His book “On Writing Well” belongs on every storyteller’s bookshelf.

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From Zinsser’s quintessential book, “On Writing Well”  here are some essential rules to clean up the clutter in ALL our communication:

1. Use a simple word rather than a fussy word or a word cluster.

Example:  “She will assist you presently” or “He is not available at this time”.

(Ugh. How stuffy! Just say “She can help you soon.” Or “He is not ready now.”)

2. Be thoughtful in your use of adverbs and adjectives. Is the word repeating something that is already evident?

Example: “She was yelling loudly.” (Yelling is inherently loud. Loudly is redundant)
Example: “The white snow glistened.” (Snow is normally white. White is not helping.)

3. Little qualifiers weaken a sentence. Strip them out.

Example: “He was pretty angry.” Or “The day was somewhat hot.”

(Keep it clean and simple. He was angry. Angry is angry. The day was hot. Hot is hot. We understand. Editing will strengthen your content.)

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Once you start applying these principles you will begin to feel an ease in your writing and storytelling. It feels good – feels RIGHT – when you hit the sweet spot of clean and clear communication.

Every word and clause you eliminate is liberating. Your writing will lift off the page without all that extra stuff weighing it down.

Simplify.

A writer must be reading widely and then practice writing. It is only by writing, making mistakes, and correcting those mistakes can a person become a wordsmith.

If you give a piece of clay to an amateur, he will make a mess, but if you give the same clay to a potter, he will make masterpieces. What’s the difference? Patience and practice.

So in order for a person to make some excellent pottery, he must waste a lot of clay in practicing pottery. That means making a mess. Nobody likes to make a mess, but every one wants to make masterpieces.

If you are not patient enough in making messes, you cannot make masterpieces.

How can I improve my English writing skills?

There may be many ways to do this, but I will put forward what I did to improve my skills. In school, I was not even remotely the best in the lot when it came to writing Essays and expressing my thoughts coherently in English. However, I realised this weakness at the school level itself, and worked actively to improve upon it.

1. Somebody told me reading newspapers helps in improving English communication skills. So, I subscribed to an English daily. This was way back in 2004, when The Telegraph (Kolkata) used to be available at 50 paise per day. I was in the 7th standard, and I hardly ever understood anything from the newspaper in the first few months. It was more or less Greek to me. However, few things started making sense, gradually. Like the sections on Sports, Movies and Entertainment.
2. Despite getting to ‘see’ and ‘touch’ a newspaper daily, my English essays were regularly made fun of in my tuition classes, which I took in 9th standard. My English teacher made it a point to make me feel how bad my writing was, by reading out my essays to the entire class. I used to feel bad about this back then. Now, I realise what kind of a catalyst this period served to be in my life. To get rid of the feeling of inferiority, I started writing more Essays. In 9th and 10th standard I must have written atleast 30 to 40 essays to improve my writing skills. The first few Essays were outright pathetic. Towards the end, things improved a lot. I ended up being the solo representative from my school in the prestigious Inter-Jesuit Schools Essay Competition in 2007. My writing had improved as a result of regular practice. But it was not remotely good enough. This was because I had failed to win any medal for my school in that competition.
3. Fast forward to 1st year in college - 2011. By then, I knew how important English had become as a medium of communication. Besides, I had been reading a brilliant newspaper like The Hindu since end-2010. The beauty of the English language was getting its grip on me. I lost interest in my graduation course pretty quickly. So, I decided to master this language in the 4 years in college. This combination of reading and writing helped refine my thinking to a large extent.
4. I did 2 things - (1) Started reading various kinds of books and watching English movies, on a consistent basis (2) Maintained (and regularly revised) a diary to take down meanings of difficult words that I came across.
   
   This may sound very methodical and idealistic, but the real pain was in being consistent. I made it a point to note down the meanings of the difficult words, at any time of the day. There were occasions when I used to get up at 3.30 AM in the night, after watching a movie, to note down some of these words. In this way, I started enriching my vocabulary.
5. To improve my writing skills, I started writing a couple of blogs. I used to write on anything and everything. Most of it did not make sense at times - like daily summaries of IPL matches, or the updates from Anna Hazare’s movement in New Delhi (it was raging on back then). Practically, nobody read my blogs but I still wrote crazily almost everyday.
6. People might find it hard to digest, but I kept repeating the activities in Points 4 and 5 for the next 2 years. With full dedication, and with nobody to stop me from doing any of it. By the end of the 2nd year in college, I had developed decent writing skills. It was good enough to fetch me a work-from-home freelance writing job, which paid 10 paisa per word. Seems like peanuts, but that was when I first realised my self-worth. For a long time, I thought I was a nobody. But this meagre earning gave me a strange kind of confidence.
7. I took on from there, and used my writing ability to earn some handy pocket money. As my profile improved, more assignments came my way. I wrote for a number of websites in the years to follow, and interacted with several writers who helped me further fine-tune my words. After clearing Civil Services, I chose to spend more time on Quora. Sometime from now, I wish to execute my plan of writing a book. As you can see, I have chosen to go stepwise about this whole thing.

Tips from my side -

1. Improving English writing skills shall not happen in a day. It requires sustained efforts for years. But once you master it, its yours. And people will appreciate you for that.
2. Don’t be impatient with yourself. All that you plan might seem to be falling off initially. But, push yourself hard to get over the starting phase. Things become easy thereafter.
3. Writing cannot be a standalone activity. Unless you read good quality books/journals/blogs, you are unlikely to develop good writing habits.
4. Don’t be let down by disparaging comments from people. In my case, such comments actually helped me in executing the long term plans.
   
   Remember - “If people are not laughing at your dreams, then they are not big enough” (Grayson Marshall).