By maren john

I write about family, speech and writing industry.

A woman in front of a computer
Uman Austin


I guessed you think it is coding. People call it one skill everyone should learn in this century for the future too. But, longer than that, the topic reads every aspiring writer not everyone. It's about writing.

Writing works great. So I went through most writing topics on Google to learn to be a writer. I read many advice I became lost on which to follow.

I wrote gibberish, hissed, mourned and said I would never be a good writer. I would have never been if what I say is what would become of me. But this would have affected my teaching carrier.

Writing is not being taught in school just for knowing sake. It is school itself and all the best entertainment industries—music, movies, documentary and theater.

So I found out one skill every aspiring writer should learn is to be a good editor, instead of writing a useless junk of works. One of the factors that distinguish between learning to write and learning to edit is that failed writers failed forever but not editors who have more chances to be the best writers. Or think about it yourself!

Professors who advised me to follow outlines are good editors but I rejected their advice because, like most aspiring writers, I followed shortcut which became a wrong way. Even E.B White who said most of his writings are unplotted still said in The Elements of Style (2000) that a paragraph should be a unit of writing composition. But If you have 10 paragraphs, doesn’t it mean you have 10 units of writing? Then what is the difference between the 10 units and 10 outline points?

Even if you don’t follow outlines but write gibberish and send it to editors who must edit the work, they would, like ghost writers, make outlines. But the work is cumbersome. They would break the manuscript into several units, first chapters if it is a book, then passages (short text) and then finally paragraphs so that they would understand where there are faults. After that they would give each paragraph, then each sentence good attention to make the whole work coherent: before they would now look for line and copy editors. All these they do because here are fifty-nine words that could change the world by Professor William Strunk Jr.:

‘Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.’