Plan, Write, Revise

March 26, 2015 by Jenny Morse in writing, Business Skills

Today, a seminar participant wrote on his feedback form: "This seminar took writing, which seems complicated and difficult, and made it really simple: plan, write, revise.

Some people are afraid of the blank page. Planning gets those writers started so that they are never faced with a blank page. The page has, at a minimum, their responses to the planning prompts.

Writing Habits

October 17, 2014 by Jenny Morse in Business Skills, writing

Recently, I’ve been reading The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. The ideas in it are fascinating. Basically, a habit is a routine that happens in response to a particular cue and leads to a particular reward. Habits are shortcuts for our brain, ways of transforming everyday tasks into automatic ones. In Duhigg’s book, he explains how it works and how certain people and companies have used this built-in system to improve or create new habits.

Formal writing

October 02, 2014 by Jenny Morse in Business Skills, Formatting, writing

“Formal” means having form, relying on conventions, following established etiquette. It is not a synonym of nonsense, complicated, thesaurus-like.

Writing well is hard (for everyone)

February 01, 2014 by Jenny Morse in Business Skills, Communication, writing

I've been teaching writing for almost 10 years. I've had a lot of students. The ones who succeed feel challenged and work to surpass that challenge. They recognize that writing requires practice, and they work at it.

Specific Examples

October 03, 2013 by Jenny Morse in writing

Young writers seem to think that everything is better when it doesn't say anything at all. They like poems that could be anyone, anywhere, feeling anything:

Become a good writer

September 13, 2012 by Jenny Morse in writing, Reading

A lot of people want to know how one becomes a "good writer." People ask me all the time: What should I study? How can I practice grammar? Where can I learn to improve my writing? The truth is one becomes a better writer by reading.

Writer's Block

September 22, 2011 by Jenny Morse in writing

Sometimes it's hard to get started writing. I read all kinds of essays where the first paragraph is almost nonsense. Words, sentence fragments, just ideas that only barely relate to what a person really wants to write about. It takes almost a full page to get to the good stuff. We worry so much about that first word. What is it going to be? Where will it lead us? Is it going to be a good word, the right word? But the first word doesn't matter at all. We can always delete whatever it is. We can replace it with something else. The important thing is to start writing, whatever that writing is.