057 • The main difference between my writing at the start and now
057 • The main difference between my writing at the start and now
Welcome back to Fundamentalised,
There’s one main way in which my writing has improved over the last year and a half since I started.
It's context awareness. The knowledge of where I’m writing and who I’m writing for.
I’ve said before that I don’t look to incorporate new techniques in my writing, preferring to try things out intuitively and judge the reaction from readers.
This rules out much of technical improvement. In the future though, I’ll look to improve the intricacies of my writing rather than emphasising this fundamental.
However, it's the fundamentals, of course, that have gotten me to the point I’m at today from where I was a year and a half ago...
The only writing I’d done before my first Medium article were proper and correct stories and essays in English classes at secondary school.
This came across heavily in what I used to produce - the pieces were riddled with long paragraphs and wordy sentences.
Most of the time now, each sentence has it’s own dedicated line, or close to this. I’ve found that splitting things up makes the piece more digestible, especially on a screen, where attention can shift so easily
It's because of this point that clarity ties into online writing so heavily. There’s so much a potential reader could be consuming on the internet so being able to put your point across in a quick and powerful way is crucial.
Compare this to when I was writing for a teacher or professor who had to slog through everything I’d written, regardless of how long-winded and empty the content was. I could waffle and they'd have no choice but to suffer.
No such luck when you're writing online. If someone doesn't like what they're reading they'll be gone in a flash, so keep this front-of-mind when you're writing as I've started to learn to do.
In other news...
Just this morning I finished updating the Fundamentalised website from an article perspective - everything I’ve written on Medium in the past and have paywalled is now available for free there.
Now all that’s left in terms of catching up on backlog is to add the missing Fundamentalised issues.
I’m going to get these done in the next couple of days and will let you know when I do on the social links below, so follow me there to stay updated.
Talk soon,
-- Theo
