By Elsie Smythe
Editor, North Snowshoe State Paddy Drop

One of my favorite weekly columns in the Minneapolis Star Tribune comes from Dr. Stephen Wilbers, a business writing consultant. Much of what he has to say about good business writing pertains as well to good student writing—or good writing in general. Dr. Wilbers believes people who are weak writers (that is, most of us, at least when we’re just starting out) can learn to be good writers, but they need to chase away some of the myths about writing, such as:

Only naturally talented people can write well. Maybe in football or fashion modeling “either you have it or you don’t,” but anyone can learn to be a competent writer, and most could learn to write well enough to get by in many mass media jobs. It doesn’t take some spark of brilliance. It does take practice and determination.

If you’re good at numbers you’re bad at writing, and vice versa. This is clearly not true, as the many excellent technical writers in industry prove to us. The ability to concentrate on specific things, to think logically, to group and present can be part of a math brain or a writing brain. Says Dr. Wilbers, “The engineers-can’t-write myth serves as a convenient excuse for inattention and incompetence.”

Learning to write is easy if you just know the right tricks. I wrote a booklet for beginning media writing students called Small Packages: Write Bright, Have Fun, Be Read. In it I tried to emphasize that writing can be fun, and used a few metaphors to illustrate useful themes. That’s not to say writing is easy to learn: good writing takes practice. You can’t do it in one semester, in one class. It takes years of attention, and that’s why our majors write and write in nearly every communication class they take. Yes, there are principles, yes, there are short-cuts, but to be a really competent writer you need to reach beyond that.

Once writers reach a certain level of ability, they don’t have to learn anymore. You can always refine your skill, always learn how to do it better. Or avoid falling into old bad habits, one of my problems. Just because you’ve written some good stuff doesn’t mean the next effort will be better. Keep reading other people’s good writing, keep learning, keep resisting smug affirmations that stifle growth. And soon you’ll be writing like a pro, certainly better than your ol’ university newspaper editor!