Doing Economics

2.10 The Act of Writing
A chapter on writing papers would be incomplete without discussing the act
of writing itself.
I cannot claim to be a good writer, but I have managed to become a
competent one over the years. To carry my earlier analogies further, no one
can become a good film director who has not watched a lot of films, good
and bad, and no jazz musician can become proficient at improvising over
chord changes who has not listened to a lot of other musicians doing it. It is
the same with writing, and the best way to become a competent writer is to
spend time reading. Here, almost anything will do—just find something you
enjoy reading, and which has been professionally produced. English is my
second language, so when I made the conscious decision to improve my
written English during my first year of college, I settled on taking the The
Economist and the novels of Robertson Davies with me on my daily
subway ride to campus. Reading regularly will provide a solid foundation
upon which to build your own writing skills.
Beyond that, there are a number of excellent resources on how to
improve your writing. Among the ones I have benefited from are Strunk
and White’s classic The Elements of Style, Zinsser’s On Writing Well, best-
selling author Stephen King’s On Writing, and Phillips’ Ernest Hemingway
on Writing.

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Generally, however, the following rules of thumb can help you become a
better writer:
1. Briefly embrace mediocrity. When trying to write anything,
anyone but the most self-delusional of narcissists will typically
hear a voice in their head immediately criticizing anything they
write once they write it. In a now-famous section of her 1995
book Bird by Bird titled “Shitty First Drafts,” Anne Lamott
outlined a very useful strategy to become more productive as a
writer, which is as follows: When we write the first draft of
anything, we should do so fully expecting that nothing good will
come out of it, and knowing that the first draft will be, well, shit.
But once you have a first draft, you can improve upon it—no one
will ever see how bad your first draft was, and you can just keep
polishing it until you have a product you like. The same cannot be
said of a draft that never gets written and remains an idea in your
mind because you could not briefly embrace mediocrity.
2. Writing is rewriting. Speaking of polishing, as much as people
like to believe urban legends about this or that famous writer who
wrote their magnum opus in one fell swoop,
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the bulk of writing
anything consists in rewriting it to make it better. As I have
mentioned when discussing above how to write introductions, this
act of rewriting is what ultimately can take a mediocre first draft
and make it good.
3. Write every day. Though this seems like a tall order—who
actually has time every day to dedicate to writing?—it really is
not when you think about it. Unless you make a point of not
responding to email (say, because you are on vacation), every day
you spend in this profession will bring an occasion for you to
make the decision to deliberately write well in some form, even if
that form is responding to email. Though some productivity tips
and other “life hacks” encourage you not to worry about proper
capitalization and grammar when writing email (presumably in an
effort to add a whole five minutes of productivity to your day), I
would encourage you to see everything you write as an occasion
to write clearly and concisely—in other words, to write

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competently. If you want more occasions to write, the habit of
keeping a daily journal builds writing time into your day.