10 tips for more compelling writing

My youngest sister is in graduate school, earning her Ph.D. in biology. Suddenly immersed in the “publish or perish” culture, she’s been struggling with the tiresome task of co-authoring research papers. She once sent me a text at 2:30 a.m. that said, “I don’t know how you can write as your career. I want to set my laptop on fire right now.”

Whether it’s academic, corporate, or technical text, or you’re simply trying to think of what to scribble on a colleague’s birthday card, writing can be bewildering, tedious work.

To make it less so, I pulled together the following writing tips.

1. Write first; edit later.
Do not edit as you write. Research on the lateralization of the brain tells us that editing is a “left brain” function and writing is a “right brain” function. To make your writing more effective, turn off your left-brain critic and just write.