LAW PUNDIT Friday, December 01, 2006 12/01/2006 08:44:00 AM [Home]
Improve Your Writing : Break Your Task Down into Modules : The Principle of Granularity
How much of your professional, educational or personal life involves writing?
In many cases, your answer is bound to be "a lot".
As someone who has taught legal writing at the law school level, I can affirm that good writing is one of the key roads to success in our modern world. KNOWING something is one thing. COMMUNICATING that knowledge to others is quite another thing.
David Pescovitz at Boing Boing has just made a posting about Michael Leddy (who blogs at orange crate art), a write-proven Professor of English, who recently wrote a Lifehack.org essay titled Granularity for Students.
The essense of Leddy's principle of granularity in writing is that although many writing tasks can appear formidable if viewed as a whole, they can become quite manageable if the whole is broken down into chunks, and even better, if these chunks in turn are broken down into even smaller chunks, etc.
Indeed, this strategy has always been a fundamental element for the wisdom of making an outline before writing. An outline not only "organizes" our thoughts, but it also channels our writing towards modular execution.
One good way to teach anyone, especially a student, the value of granularity in writing, is to have that person write several pages on a given topic "off the cuff", without an outline and without modular writing. THEN that same person is instructed about modular writing and asked to rewrite that same topic, first making an outline and then writing the piece modularly. Of course, the second effort is almost always far superior to the first. Q.E.D.
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 12/01/2006 08:44:00 AM
Improve Your Writing : Break Your Task Down into Modules : The Principle of Granularity
How much of your professional, educational or personal life involves writing?
In many cases, your answer is bound to be "a lot".
As someone who has taught legal writing at the law school level, I can affirm that good writing is one of the key roads to success in our modern world. KNOWING something is one thing. COMMUNICATING that knowledge to others is quite another thing.
David Pescovitz at Boing Boing has just made a posting about Michael Leddy (who blogs at orange crate art), a write-proven Professor of English, who recently wrote a Lifehack.org essay titled Granularity for Students.
The essense of Leddy's principle of granularity in writing is that although many writing tasks can appear formidable if viewed as a whole, they can become quite manageable if the whole is broken down into chunks, and even better, if these chunks in turn are broken down into even smaller chunks, etc.
Indeed, this strategy has always been a fundamental element for the wisdom of making an outline before writing. An outline not only "organizes" our thoughts, but it also channels our writing towards modular execution.
One good way to teach anyone, especially a student, the value of granularity in writing, is to have that person write several pages on a given topic "off the cuff", without an outline and without modular writing. THEN that same person is instructed about modular writing and asked to rewrite that same topic, first making an outline and then writing the piece modularly. Of course, the second effort is almost always far superior to the first. Q.E.D.
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 12/01/2006 08:44:00 AM
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