My partner read my post about what makes a game last week and said she loved it, but it committed two cardinal sins of writing:
- I used a dictionary definition
- I used the words ‘what it means to be human’
I’m going to hold my hands up and say, yep, those are both pretty shocking.
In my defence, I’ve been listening to a lot of the Origin Story podcast recently and pretty much every episode is structured around a dictionary definition. Doesn’t stop it being a cliché though!
And references to ‘the human condition’ are, yeah, pretty godawful.
The thing with these blogs is I’m committing myself to writing them quickly every day so inevitably some bits of actively bad writing are going to creep in! But having someone point out the clichés you fall into is incredibly useful.
What do people do to avoid bad writing, especially in short blogs like this one? My plan is to start by aiming to make each of these blogs shorter (less than 250 words) which means I should have time to do rewrites…
2 thoughts on “How to kick the habits of bad writing”
Write long-hand, with a pen, on paper. When you type it up, you knock out all the boring bits because they bore you when you type them. Instant second draft!
LOVE this idea. I’ll give it a go.
See also: funky old-fashioned typewriter, though that might be a bit more pricey.