“So many English teachers shoved complex sentences down my throat that now a simple sentence almost makes my skin crawl.”
That’s Tim Biden, during a Twitter conversation about writing for the web.
He was responding to a tweet Rough Draft host Demian Farnworth shared with a link to his first Copyblogger post: “The Disgustingly Simple Rule for Web Writing That’s Often Hard to Swallow.”
Tim retweeted the link and said, “I hate that he’s right.”
Clueless, as usual, about anything not immediately in front of him, Demian asked, “Why you hate?”
Then Tim dropped that heavy-weight comment above.
Demian responded with: “I was fortunate to skip most of school as a lad so as not to be brainwashed. But I didn’t learn how to write either.”
In fact, it wasn’t until Demian went back to college in his late twenties that he learned how to write. His last year in school, he even won an essay contest.
That is a major achievement for a guy who equated good writing with jungle juice and obscure poetry. See, the thing is, Demian had to learn the rules.
Eventually. Particularly this rule about clarity …
In this 6-minute episode of Rough Draft, host Demian Farnworth discusses:
- A beautiful Stanley Fish quote about clarity
- The single greatest reason most of us are afraid of writing
- All you need to write clear sentences
Rough Draft on iTunes
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