Here’s a writing tip I’ve been nurturing for a while now: never, ever take your Writer Mittens off.
Of course you bring your A-Game with your stories and novels. Anyone with a blog or something similar will try to make the sentences coherent and representative of their skill. What I’ve been making an effort to do is apply my skills to comments and other “ephemeral” strings of words in this online world.
Unless you’ve fallen into some red-hot online tirade against the most witless of internet trolls (and I hope you’re better than that), take a moment to watch your sentence structure. Build the suspense of the comment. Rather than call the president “an idiot”, open your thesaurus and try “dribbling buffoon”.
This may be overly complicated if you’re posting using only your thumbs while hunkering in your cubicle so the boss doesn’t see you, but otherwise, I find it a fun little exercise to help keep the writing cardio in top form.
(Why don’t you try it right now? I’m always keen to read comments here.)
(But you can’t use “dribbling buffoon”. Dig deeper.)
1 comment:
You're saying to write better abuse? Who in hell do you think you are to tell me how to be abusive? My gran knew abuse. She wrote a column of abuse for the local paper for twenty-seven years, each one slightly better than the last, and one day the locals came in a mob, burned her house down, shot her dog, and hanged her. She said, "Honey, I want you to have my intellectual property." I said, "Gran, nobody wants two and a half million words of badly written abuse." She replied, "I just don't feel like being hanged alone." That's abuse. Don't tell me about abuse. Gran was a pro. Admittedly only for a day. You weevil-sucking penguin.
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