I’ve been trying to read this summer. Not just read several pages at random intervals or skim several pages of a book. It’s been a while since I actually sat down and read for a good half an hour – and textbooks don’t count.<\/p>\n
I have been reading about reading, and about writing. I am currently reading \u201cOn Writing Well\u201d, written by William Zinsser. It\u2019s a great book about writing with a great message. The book centers around the argument that most writing is unnecessarily complicated.<\/p>\n
The life-changing message of ‘On Writing Well’ is: simplify your language and thereby find your humanity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Especially in law, business, and some academic fields, writing is full of jargon and paragraphs are convoluted.<\/p>\n
I can\u2019t agree with his point more. My writing used to be complex, and full of large and overly grandiose words. Looking back now, I would say my writing was poor. Writing is a tool to communicate ideas. There is no need to be unnecessarily dense with language and if something can be said in one sentence, use one sentence.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m glad I happened to find this book. It\u2019s given me a lot of new insights and thoughts about writing. Definitely one of the best, if not the best, books on writing that I\u2019ve read.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve been trying to read this summer. Not just read several pages at random intervals or skim several pages of a book. It’s been a while since I actually sat down and read for a good half an hour – and textbooks don’t count. I have been reading about reading, and about writing. I am […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6438,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/harvardthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/harvardthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/harvardthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/harvardthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6438"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/harvardthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/harvardthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/harvardthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions\/22"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/harvardthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/harvardthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/harvardthoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}