Your Writing Sucks
But that’s OK
I’m going to be blunt: Your writing sucks. If it didn’t, you wouldn’t be here. Heck, even if your writing is fine, you probably think it could be better and want to know how to do that.
But before we get into that, it’s important to understand why your writing sucks. The answer is the U.S. secondary and postsecondary education system.
When you were younger, you wrote for yourself. You were taught to be creative and express yourself, and simply staying on topic was a major accomplishment.
But when you reached high school, your audience changed. In fact, it became a single person: your teacher. Everything you wrote — every book report, every term paper, every college thesis — was written for an audience of one.
Now think about that audience for a second. Overworked. Underpaid. The piece you are writing is the 4,736th time that someone has taken five to seven pages to tell them that the fish in “The Old Man and the Sea” is a metaphor for success.
It didn’t help that you weren’t all that jazzed about the assignment either. You fiddled with font sizes and margins and padded out your sentences with academic jargon. You repeated yourself. You inserted randomly chosen synonyms to sound smart.
As far as good writing goes, this is pretty much a worst-case scenario. You hated it, your teacher was being paid to read it. And it showed. No one picks up a copy of the Best American Term Papers of 2019 at the bookstore.
Here’s the good news. What is learned can be unlearned. Now that you want to write for a real live audience, in an actual publication, about interesting topics, and even get paid, you will need to get rid of the habits that made your writing suck.
In this class, we will go over those habits. We’ll talk about what it takes to get an audience interested, how to hook your readers in the first sentence, and how to write clearly and colorfully.
You can get better at writing. You will get better at writing. Instead of being paid to read your words, people will pay you to write them, and other people will pay them to read them. In short, your writing won’t suck.
At least, most of the time.
