Effective Writing Practice
Writing is an invaluable tool with a range of uses, from informal texting with friends to carefully crafted social media posts to career-shaping communications. Writing is also hard. Many struggle to write, especially as the stakes increase. Texting your best friend is probably easy. Writing a novel as a hobby is a lot harder. And writing is even harder in more formal settings like school and work.
For the past 20 years, I’ve been working as a writing coach for graduate students and professors. In the course of that work, I’ve thought, read, and written extensively about how to write more effectively. In 2007, I started my first blog on blogspot. Since then, there’s a second blog on my website, an academic book co-authored with my dissertation advisor, a self-published dissertation-writing book, and an academic guide to writing literature reviews that is (as of March 2026) featured on the UC Berkeley library website.
In this, my first article on Medium, I invite you to join me as I explore the question of how to become a better writer.
What is a Good Writer?
How would you answer this question? The most common answer, I imagine, is that a good writer is someone who produces good writing. This answer leads to the question: what is good writing? But I want to pursue a different idea of being a good writer, one that isn’t as common.
The idea I want to pursue is that a good writer is someone who gets more out of the process than they have to put in: their benefits outweigh their costs. A related description is that a good writer is someone who gets what they want from writing. That answer focuses only on the desired goal.
If that’s our view, then to answer this question, we have to know why we’re writing and what we hope to get out of writing. The better you understand what you want to do, the easier it is to achieve that goal, and therefore the easier it is for your benefits to outweigh your costs.
Know Your Purposes
Why do you write? Do you write for work? For school? For pleasure? Are you writing to entertain? To inform or educate? To heal yourself? For a good writing exercise, write out the reasons you want to write.
Human motivation is complex. Different needs and desires drive each of us. We want success; we want to shape our social position; we want to get our professor or boss off our back. The child may write a thank-you note for a birthday present because their parents told them to, or because they’re really grateful and excited to write their thanks. The scholar might write because they want a job or tenure, because they’re excited to share interesting ideas, because they want to teach and help others grow, or because they want to solve some social problem. The novelist might write because they want to express themselves, audience be damned, or because they want to entertain. These are the kinds of motivations that first come to mind when we talk about purposes.
Another set of purposes that are less often considered are in how the writing is used. All the purposes discussed in the previous paragraph are for some sort of social outcome — one centered on writing as a tool for communication. But writing is not always for communication: two valuable roles for writing are to support memory and to support development of new ideas. By recognizing these various purposes, writers can more effectively apply their efforts.
Effective Writing Practice
Every writer is different, so precise details about what makes an effective writing practice will vary. But we’re all human, so we also share a great deal, too. Especially, we all share the potential for learning and growth; indeed growth and change are inevitable. This constant change means that our purposes change too.
With this in mind, I like to focus on the question of “effective writing practice,” to highlight both the immediate moments and the long-term picture. The idea of effective research practice invites both the question of how to use the next minute effectively and how to use the next year or decade effectively.
Please come check out my Medium account (https://thoughtclearing.medium.com), where this was originally posted.
