Does your writing feel dead? Here's how to spark life into it

Developing strong writing skills saves you time in the workplace and makes your audience happy. And a clear writer is often the sign of a clear thinker. Here’s one place you can read brilliant writing and one exercise that you can do to develop your writing muscle…

Big things in a small space. Mining meaning out of millions of minutes. A lifetime on a page. 

There’s a place where you can see brilliant writing.

Often it’ll be about someone you never knew. And now sadly never will.

Sometimes, it will make you raise an eyebrow and you’ll discover something amazing.

And it always stays with you afterwards.

To improve your writing, improve your reading

What am I talking about?

The last page in “The Economist” the obituary.

In 1000 words a person’s life is distilled.

A light is shone here and there on pivotal moments.

What made them them.

Turning points.

Challenges.

How their life influenced the world and how the world influenced their life.

Since 2003, Economist writer, Ann Wroe, has been writing about those who recently passed on.

And she’s amazing at it.

Yes, it’s informative.

It’s also a fabulous lesson in writing.

How to summarise and crystallise.

How to zone in and illuminate.

How to engage readers in a story that covers decades in a few paragraphs.

And Ann Wroe’s obituaries are brilliant writing.

Here’s one of my favourites.

It’s about Emma Morano, who at 117 was the oldest woman in the world.

Her obituary covers over a century of living in 962 words.

Constraints help you write better

Now it’s likely that most of your writing is emails or reports and you’re not writing obituaries as part of your job.

However, like Ann, you want to engage your readers and communicate clearly without waffle and padding.

I’m often asked by clients about how they can do this.

One of the best ways is to read good quality writing - which you can do by reading Ann Wroe’s brilliant column.

But to practice this yourself, grab some paper or open up a new document.

Do this to be a better writer

Choose one of the following titles and write 200 words on it - which is about half a page.

1) An update on a current project at work.

2) Highlights of a holiday.

3) Your first day at a new school.

Now, each of these topics will be ones you know very well. So, you could write at length about them. In fact you could probably bash out 1000 words easily on each of them.

But the challenge is to share the main bits about the topic in a short space.

So, there’s going to be a lot of thinking going on, in terms of what will you leave out, what will you put in and what’s the order of what you’ll write.

Tricky, isn’t it?

But the more you do this exercise, the clearer your thinking will become and the clearer and sharper your writing will be.

Try it. And let me know how you get on.

And if being a better writer and developing your writing skills is something that you’d like to work on, drop me a line on mica@micaallan.com