Day 37
Writing is a skill. In here I send notes of my writing from the 50 days of writing course by David Perell, to reflect, develop and build my writing style.
In the 37th email from 50 days of writing, David Perell talks about F.A.S.T Writing.
(Note: This day 37 notes will be my thoughts mixed with what David mentions in the mail as this one requires the immediate responses to better convey the message.)
David talks about how writing in schools were slow, where in students first received the syllabus at the beginning of the semester/year. Later teachers decide the time for outlines and first drafts and sometimes the final ones too. Writing only begins at the end of the semester/year after they listened to the lessons and read from other books, resources.
This method David calls as SLOW Writing, which is an acronym for Syllabus, Listen, Observe and Write.
This S.L.O.W writing can't be achieved as a working adult. Time is limited, other responsibilities take priority. So, David states, the only way to write is by learning to write F.A.S.T.
Both literally and figuratively.
F.A.S.T is an acronym that stands for Find, Assemble, Speak and Teach.
Find:
Find correlates to us finding good ideas to build our writing upon. In order to achieve this, we need to have a collection of ideas in our Note-taking System. Without Notes, our research is just as stressful as the academic years, where there is deadline and you wait until the end of the year to get to writing.
Instead, imagine you start gathering notes - no matter how small the idea relating to the Essay you write, over time, you will have something that will eventually turn out something unique and the essay will be done within the given deadline.
So, Find attributes to finding notes from a Good Note-taking System. You can read more about Note-taking from few older posts as David's main lesson was to build a note-taking system.
Assemble:
Writing without notes is like trying to build a campfire without a pile of wood.
This phase of writing is just to assemble the pile of woods to build a campfire i.e. the notes to write the article.
Speak:
Talking with others forces you to structure your ideas in ways that thinking alone never can because whenever you’re persuading or storytelling, you’re developing ideas you can eventually write about. The clarifying questions that arise reveal the holes in your argument that you can remove the next time you explain an idea. The more you can think in conversations you’re already having, the more refined your ideas will be when you start typing.
The more you speak, the more ideas are exchanged. The more ideas are exchanged, the more you have ideas to write. This way you eventually build a system.
Remember, good writing makes you a better speaker.
Teach:
The last phase attributes to teaching. Online writing is mostly a two-way teaching. You teach readers something, the reader's teach you something else.
It is a virtuous feedback loop where the better you write about a topic, the better the quality of feedback and insights you receive.
Teaching is the best way to learn the topic they say. I remember my friends and I, in order to understand a topic we would divide each topic and teach others what we learnt. This way we learnt way faster and also, the topic began to seem interesting.
Thank you for reading.
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