The Truth About Writing

Here's the truth: despite what multitudes of English instructors may have told you, writing is not all about grammar, punctuation and spelling. In fact, focusing too much on such mechanical skills--as countless English teachers and standardized tests have proven--can actually interfere with a person's ability to learn how to write well. With the start of every new semester, I encounter throngs of students who have fallen victim to this misconception:

"I'm a terrible writer," many claim, certain their difficulties with commas makes them such.

"Writing is totally boring," others will claim, having surely suffered through years of sentence diagramming and grammar drills.

Untrue--on both counts. While some proficiency with grammar, spelling and punctuation is necessary to produce writings others can understand and will take seriously, such "rules" are of minimalistic importance. Think of these mechanical aspects like the nails and screws of a house. While placing them in the correct spots is important, as they keep the house from falling down, no one ever buys a house because of its pretty and well-placed nails and screws. Instead, people are interested in the architecture, the color, the sizes of the rooms, and the landscaping.

The same is true of writing: readers (beyond those grammar-obsessed teachers, anyway) are more interested in how you organize your information, the text's approach to a problem, the development and details supporting your ideas, and indeed the "sound" of your sentences. The best way to improve your skills in all of these areas--including mechanics, by the way--is to dump the drills and diagramming and instead practice at real writing whenever possible. After all, learning to write well is more like learning to drive well or pilot an airplane well than memorizing facts and rules for a biology test.