Writing Form & Structure
It’s a pleasure to read beautiful prose, and it’s a different sort of pleasure to read text that clearly explains or expresses something with the minimum of gimmickry or floweriness.
I’ve had (and continue to have, fortunately) the opportunity to write pieces that lean toward both extremes; in some cases unabashedly focusing on language that sounds like me (rich with all my internal parenthetical meanderings), in others intentionally carving away the excess to present the meat of the issue—nothing more, nothing less.
Ages ago, when teaching myself javascript (one of my pandemic projects), I built a little web app called Authorcise that was intended to help me flex my writing muscles before diving into serious word-related work.
The idea was to give myself a short window in which to write something random about whatever (the app provides a single-word prompt and gives you 150 seconds to jot whatever comes to mind), and I found that doing this exercise early in the day helped me establish the right mindset (creative or focused) before I settled into a more serious period of scribbling.
Authorcise was based on a habit of unprompted short writings that I found helped me achieve similar outcomes, and journal writing has been useful for the purpose, as these sorts of jottings are almost always intended for personal use, and that means you can be as bonkers as you like (or as cold and direct as you dare) and no one will know but you.
Of course, my best formal writing tends to benefit from periodic flourishes, and my artistic stuff is a lot more effective when it’s properly structured and casually digestible. Neither extreme is as interesting or useful as blends of the two, so prepping for the right written voice is seldom a matter of locating oneself at one end of the spectrum or the other—it’s about finding the proper footing somewhere in between.
Post-draft rebalancing is almost always necessary if you want to ensure the equilibrium is right for the intended audience and purpose. But it’s possible to get partway there ahead of time by priming your brain for the right mode of thinking and tone of voice before you officially begin.