Wanted: secret ingredient to being a better writer
Mark Pilgrim’s discussion
of the quality of writing on the web (which prompted me to bring a little Stoppard
last Sunday) centers around the following:
I grew up being taught, believing, and teaching others to believe that
there were only two things you needed to do to become a good writer:
- Read every day
- Write every day
But now we have thousands of webloggers who read other webloggers
every day, and who themselves write every day, and they’re not
getting any better at writing. […] there is obviously a
secret third ingredient required for becoming a good writer. You need to
read every day… and write every day… and X.
He’s gotten a few responses, each postulating what X might be. Here’s my take:
The key is what the webloggers are reading.
It’s a little like striving to become a grand master in chess, but
refusing to play with anyone but the high school chess team for
practice. Perhaps this is some fundamental law of learning; You can only
potentially exceed your teacher’s skill level by some small epsilon.
In the case of the weblog community, we have a pool of lousy writers,
all reading each other, and writing more and more like each other every
day. There’s no tide, as it were, to lift all these boats.
I am a lousy writer, in large part because almost everything I read is
also poorly written. Weblogs, company emails, technical reports: this is
my diet of words, and, well, you are what you eat.