Writing For Impact? How to Write Well

The Task of Writing

So, we asked about authors and books at the beginning and a few of you shared and since Norma mentioned Marilyn Robinson, I thought I’d start by sharing one of my favourite quotes from her novel, Home. In the context, a character called Glory is speaking about church and she says this as she sits back and reflects on it. Though she’s speaking about church, I think what she says applies very well to writing and it’s that, “Part of the task (in writing) is to parse the broken heart of humans and to praise the loving heart of Christ.” And I thought that was a great little way to think about teaching or writing, preaching of course. “To parse humans and our broken hearts and to praise the loving heart of Christ.”

Now I’m going to start maybe in a strange way, but during the course, during the course of my studies there was a serious case of gross and deliberate plagiarism, which led to an expulsion and an assignment-wide crackdown in the college to discourage plagiarism and to promote better citations and the acknowledgment of sources. And so, almost by force of habit, I want to begin this learning by listing a few of those and, as I do so, hopefully to teach you a little something as well. And that is people, authors and books that have benefited me in my own writing. And as I prepared for this talk, I really thought that you need three kinds of sources or people in your lives if you are to be a good writer. And as I work through them, I’ll thank a few of them too, maybe they’re watching or will listen to this at another time.

Acknowledgements and Introductions

Firstly, you need editors. Okay, you need editors. Now this isn’t necessarily someone like myself who is paid to edit but rather people who will, who will look at, who will discuss, who will provide useful feedback and encouragement in the writing process. And so, my editors would be the supervisor of my masters, Jonathan, my wife, always a faithful editor, and one of my very good friends, Stuart. We need editors if we’re to be good writers.

Secondly, you need teachers. You need people who have done writing and will then impart some of the tools for it. Instructors, you might call them. People who can train you by talking about some of the theory, some of the tips, tools, and that’s what hopefully we’ll be doing now. And so, two teachers I’d like to thank: one I know in person, my systematics lecturer, Dr Ben Dean, and another who writes a lot about writing, the blogger Tim Challies.

And then thirdly, you need models and I think both the talks so far have eluded to this. You need to read people who model good writing, and in a second, we’ll think a lot more about this. And so just to thank a few of my models: Marilyn Robinson, who I’ve already mentioned. And then a few theologians who I think particularly model good writing: Carl Truman, Don Carson and of course Saint Augustine, who was mentioned this morning already. And so, thanks and credit must go to all of these if anything useful comes from the remainder of my talk.  In order to become a better writer, you need these three people or peoples in your life.

Now my name is Graham and you’ve probably never heard of me because I’m an editor. I work behind the scenes. I work on many of the articles, the written content, at the Gospel Coalition Africa which has been a wonderful privilege over the last few years. And I start also by mentioning that I’m a writer to tell you that I’m not a speaker, okay? I’m a writer and so my interaction with people usually takes place through, through email, on screen, over the phone perhaps and I’m usually dealing in words and less in conversation. And so, be kind, be gracious. There’s an old saying in English that those who can’t do, teach and you might add to that that those who can’t write, edit.

How to Write for Impact

So, my session is titled this morning “writing for impact” and I should have checked but I took that to mean really the “how” of writing. Okay so, we we’ve thought about an argument for why we should write, and I thought the Psalm 19 point was an outstanding one. God has given us these gifts language, stories to teach and to write and so we should do so to praise and to glorify him.

Secondly, what to write. To write for our audience, our local audience primarily and then those beyond it. To take God’s truth and to apply it to the issues and the challenges and the questions that the church is asking where we are. So that’s why we write and what to write, and we’re going to be doing a little bit on how to write – nuts and bolts or basics and simply how you might become a better writer.

Now, you could speak about how to write under two broader categories and I’m only going to do one this morning because of time and we want to go have lunch. And so, you could talk about how to write in terms of tone, of character you might say, and then you can think about how to write in terms of content, okay, the actual form or craft of it. And I’m going to be focusing in on the second one.

But to say just a little bit about that first of how to write: many of you will be familiar with Paul’s exhortation in 1 Corinthians 10:31. He says,

“Whether you eat or whether you drink, whatever you do, do it to the glory of God.” (1 Corinthians 10:31)

And I think we can take that “whatever you do” to encapsulate and to include our writing. If we are to write well and to do so as Christians who glorify God, then how we do so must be careful, must be considered, must be deliberate, it must demonstrate the fruits of the Spirit. We must be gracious even when we disagree. We must demonstrate love. And so, whatever you do – writing as well – write for the glory of God.

If you’d like to think more about that aspect of the “how,” then there’s a great book, it’s not here but CBD do stock it, it’s called Charitable Writing. It’s written by two American writers who teach at Wheaton, and you can also read a review of that at the Gospel Coalition Africa if you wanted to – Charitable Writing. But the authors of that book, incidentally, do speak a little bit about the second “how” – the content and the craft of writing. And there’s a great line in the book. The authors names are Beitler and Gibson and they say this,

“Like mathematics, like biology and philosophy, writing is a field of study. It isn’t only an activity that we engage in, but it is itself a discipline.”

And those words or phrases are really important as we think about how to write. Writing is a discipline. Writing is a field of study. And this is important because it tells us that writing can be learned. I like the question about whether writing is a gift or writing is a skill and I think in my experience, as I’ve worked with people, it’s both. You have people who seem to have a knack for writing and others who work hard at and become better writers through the process. There are both. But for most of us this morning, and I include myself in that, writing is a discipline. It’s something that can be worked at, improved and I wouldn’t say perfected, but certainly you can get close.

5 Principles for Becoming A Better Writer

And so, I have two broad headings for the remainder of my talk and under those, a few points. How to write. The first one is 5 general principles for becoming a better writer and then the second heading will be I think it was 6, it was 6 basic steps for good writing. Okay so, note the distinction. There the first one is how to develop as a writer and then the second one is what are some of the marks of good writing. And we’ll start with those principles and again a few of these have already been touched on so hopefully just reinforce them for you is that the 5 or at least the 5 principles or rules for writing are:

1. To read
2. To engage with what you read
3. To write, in the third place
4. To share your writing and
5. To listen to the feedback

Okay and we’ll say a little about each in turn.

So, read. As it’s already been noted, there’s a lot to read about writing, the craft. But what I’m talking about here is rather to simply read deeply and widely, to find those models and to learn from them, to see how they do certain things as they’re write – the tricks of the trade you might say or style or getting voice and tone right. This is something that you can often just pick up from reading good writing.

Marilyn Robinson, sorry I think that’s the last time I’ll mention her, she runs a writing workshop in America and one of the things that she urges her students to do is to read very widely. So, across genre, across culture, across the ages and even to read things from essays to film scripts to philosophy to history to biography, all of these, because there are good writers in every field. I mean, if you can find them, you can learn from them. Digesting a good broad diet is the one of the tricks to being healthy and the same is true for being a good writer. Read widely and reads deeply.

Secondly, and to follow on from that, write by engaging with what you read. Okay so, I think there’s a few pastors and preachers here and you might know of this as exposition. Do exposition of what you read. This is a great place to start and improve your writing. Learn to how to unpack and engage with what it is you are reading. My systematics lecturer, Ben Dean, who I thanked at the beginning, he encouraged us not to start with what with original writing, but rather to practice by summarizing the writing of others. Summarizing a book, a paragraph, paraphrasing a sentence, describe their writing, perhaps critically engage with it, draw out some of your own implications of the point that someone has made. In a word, riff on other writing. And this ties back to the first general tip. You can’t do this if you aren’t reading and yet it’s key and essential to all good writing to depend on others.

A few Sundays ago, I was having a conversation after church with one of the members of our congregation and he came up to me and he also writes, and he said to me, “Look, it looks like, it seems to me like every second or third article that you publish at Rekindle has something to do with the book Fight Club!” (The novel by Chuck Palahniuk.) And he was exaggerating. It’s more like every fourth or fifth post. But he had identified something that I encourage you to do as well: to learn from and to learn by engagement with all sorts of other writers, to enter into conversation with them and to learn in the process. So secondly, engage with what you read.

Thirdly, third principle, write. Of course, we have to write. Many of us here don’t have the luxury of writing as part of our work. It’s not something we’re paid to do and so when I say write, don’t hear me saying you need to sit down for two, three, even one hour for uninterrupted writing. I think, as Africa said, do you have half an hour as you wait for your flight and to sit down and to knock a paragraph together? And what happens here, and we’ll say more about this later, is there’s an accumulative force to writing those little pockets. The discipline, the repetition of writing results over time in a growing body of what you’ve written, but also in in the process of editing your work, you become a better writer.

So writing is both a routine and a habit, a practice to instill in your life and it is something that is accumulative. Your own writing… One of my lecturers used to say if you write 200 words a day, (let’s check the Maths here quickly) if you write 200 words a day, that’s just two paragraphs about. Then in one month you will have around 5 000 words and that’s with still keeping the Sabbath, okay. You don’t write, so it’s not 200 words on Sunday. You skip that. And you can have five thousand words. That’s five blog posts, five articles, that’s the chapter of a book, 5 000 words. And so, write steadily, build a routine, practice and make a habit out of writing, because the double benefit here is that it’ll improve you as you practice, and you will accumulate material of your own writing as you do so.

Fourthly, share your writing with others. And this is maybe, I mean, there’s a question and I don’t think you’re alone in feeling the unease and the hesitation to share your writing with others. I work as an editor in the Gospel Coalition Africa, and I’ve realized as I speak to people that publishing what you’ve written can be very daunting. And a lot of people really balk at the idea of something I said 5 years ago perhaps being able to be located by someone on the internet and found. Or maybe you don’t even want to share what it is you’re thinking right now.

There is this, and I understand that, and it’s actually a very good instinct, the what I call “humble hesitation.” I think young writers in particular, and I speak from experience here as a young writer myself, can be overly self-confident and assertive. And so, there is a place for pause, for seeking counsel, but importantly there is a place for as you write and think to share it with other people. To say, “Hey, I wrote, I wrote a thousand words on this.” Or “I’ve got a paragraph where I want to develop into an article because I’ve been thinking about this issue in our local church or this challenge in my community.” Share your writing with us.

This doesn’t mean you have to publish it, okay? This is a great thing. You can send an email. Long before the days of Zoom and conferencing and WordPress, writers would gather together with what they had written, and literally written on paper, and discuss it and feedback and say, “You can strengthen that.” Or “That’s not great. That’s not right.” You can do that with friends. I mentioned a friend at the start who I will often share an article with before I publish it to say, “Hey, what do you think about this? Is the tone right? Could I do better with the conclusion? Should this be split into two articles?” This is that first kind of person you need – an editor, someone who will examine your work.

And linked with this, the fifth principle: obviously is, you need to listen to those people. And you need to do so with humility. I started blogging in 2012, a long time ago now, and I remember the first draft I shared with the curator of the blog. And he took a troublingly long time to return the draft to me and he kept saying you know, “I’m just busy with it. I’m just looking.” And I was right to worry because when I got that draft back it was more colourful than my son’s colouring in books! It had highlights, notes, underlining, paragraphs he’d added in, you know that when Word when you delete a paragraph there’s a red paragraph to tell you it’s been retracted – it was all in there. And that was really tough because I had to spend time writing this article and look, maybe he was a bit overzealous with his editing, and you know.

But it was an opportunity to listen, an opportunity to go, okay well he’s taken the time to look at this. How can I learn from what he’s done? He’s read it as someone who’s come to an article cold. You know when you’re writing, you’re in it. And you forget that the person who stumbles onto your blog or something you published has no idea what you’ve been thinking about. And so that feedback is often very valuable. I don’t, you know, I don’t understand why you started with that sentence. And you’re going, “Well, obviously I started like that because, you know, I read two books on the weekend and that’s where they sent me.” So, you need to listen with humility.

There’s a great theologian. Her name is Simone Weil, and she wrote an excellent essay on learning which I’ve used in a few different contexts. It’s called “The right and proper use of study” actually and she identifies a temptation in all of us is that when we are corrected, she says this,

“When we’re corrected, we were tempted to give a sideways glance to the corrected exercise, and then to hide it.”

And hide it either from ourselves or from everyone else, when in actual facts to be corrected, and we know this from life as well, is valuable, is a valuable process for growth for discipleship. And Weil continues, she says this, she says,

“When we listen, we can get down to the origin of our faults and so, as the saying goes, we can learn from our mistakes.”

And even more importantly to round this point out, listening to and learning from others demands something vital for being a good writer and that’s humility. And this maybe ties in more with the character side of how to write. The authors of the book Charitable Writing which I mentioned just now they say this,

“Humility is the virtue that allows us to see not only our finitude, not only our weaknesses, but also the goods of our community. It allows us to recognize that you don’t have all the answers. It helps us to see the enormous contributions that others can make to you and to your writing.”

So, the humble person, the person who depends on others, shouldn’t be embarrassed but rather, they say that this is a potential for mutual benefit. And then in short, they concluded by saying, “Humility means being teachable and being teachable is vital for being a good writer.”

And so there are your 5 general principles. We’re moving through them quickly: read widely, engage with what you read, write, share your writing, and listen to the feedback. Five principles for being a good writer.

6 Marks of Good Writing

Now, with those principles in place, I want to turn to and consider the 6 tools or marks – I don’t know, I really struggle to know what to call them. I even tried to ask Chat GPT and it wasn’t helpful. You know, it’s not as great as they say. But basic steps perhaps, techniques for good writing, foundational rules for a good piece of writing, again.

But before I get to those, I want to give you an illustration which in some ways I think sums up this this whole, this whole talk. And it’s this: when I was in school, we would occasionally do creative writing classes and essays, and one of the only things that stuck with me from that time, which is unfortunate, was the illustration that good writing is shaped like a cat. Now I’ve been asking people while I’ve been up here in Joburg, I was in Pretoria this week as well, and no one seems to have heard this, but it makes a lot of sense, right? The cat has a head. That’s your introduction. The cat’s got a body and a body is bigger than a head, right, unless there is something wrong with your cat. And then a cat’s got a tail, and this is your conclusion, okay.

Now that’s not the illustration I want to teach you right now but it’s a useful one. The problem with it is that it over structures writing and I think if writing is too bound by a structure, it becomes a little bit boring. Instead, I want to say that writing is a bit like dancing okay. Writing is a bit like learning how to dance.

Now you can tell from my complexion that I can’t dance and there’ll be no demonstrations, sorry. You know, just the clap and singing, you know, just that’s like – I’m like maxed out in terms of what I can do. But if I wanted to learn how to dance, and I don’t, I but if I wanted to dance and I wanted to do it well, there are lots of basic steps and counting and movements that you learn. And you can learn these one at a time. And eventually the aim of doing that is if I learn enough steps, if I know how to count, if I can keep rhythm and if I know a move or two, I can eventually then string a couple of them together and well, it looks like I’m dancing. Right, it looks like I’m dancing.

No, C.S Lewis said that the aim is eventually to not even be thinking about the steps and he said that’s when you really know that you’re dancing. And writing is very similar, okay. There are these steps, and they are really valuable if you, as you start out and as you aim to improve and the hope, the aim or the outcome eventually is that you think less about them, as the writing becomes more habitual.

But I want to finish by teaching you 6 dance steps, okay, 6 dance steps for good writing, for good articles. And then I have actually, I would order these ones too. The list is not exhaustive but as I’ve worked with writers, I realize that these are typically the things I’m usually trying to help writers with. So, they’re the kind of, let me call them the FAQs, the common, the common mistakes and just by adjusting these 6 things, and deliberately doing them as you write, your writing will improve.

So here they are. The first, yeah I’ll just go through them, do you don’t need to write them all down. So, the first one is writing needs some kind of thesis, okay. Now that sounds a bit, like, sophisticated and like whoa, like thesis, you know, PhD thesis, Masters dissertation. That’s not it. That is one use of the word thesis, but another use of the word thesis is just the single idea or statement or point of a piece of writing. And like all of these 6 steps that I’m going to give you now, this these all scale, right. So, whether you’re writing a paragraph or a masterpiece – a thousand-page work, you know, your magnum opus – these scale. That is; if you do it, if you’re practicing it on the, in the small, you can do it on the big as well.

So, writing needs some kind of – what will we call it – arranging or organizing idea around which everything else is brought into conversation with. Because obviously your writing is going to have lots of ideas in it, quotes, arguments, statements, questions, and all of that, but all of these musts relate in some way to the purpose for your writing, to the thesis of what it is you are writing. And you can end up, you can state this in in different ways. Obviously, if you go into the Gospel Coalition Africa, you often see that in the first paragraph, and this is just something I encourage writers to do, they will say something like, “In this article I am going to argue that dot dot dot…”

Now that’s not the only way you can introduce a thesis statement. You can set it up by asking a question and it anticipates the thesis. You don’t have to be explicit, but as a writer and as you work and you workshop your own stuff, to know what it is that this 500-word article is trying to achieve, will really set the course for everything else that you do. It will help you also evaluate the rest of what you write.

And so, if you have a thesis statement, let’s not come up with one because I’m not good with coming with things on the spot, but if you have one and your article is a bit too long… So, you’ve been given, you know, you’ve been asked to write an 800 word reflection, yours is 1 200 words and you can look at it and go, “Okay, there’s these two paragraphs in the middle which is an idea I was really excited about at the time.” I mean if you write, you know this. You know, you’re thinking about something and then you’re writing something else but you’re like, “I’m definitely going to work that into what I’m writing!”

And what having a thesis helps you do is to look at your work and go okay, this is actually not serving the purpose or the statement or the aim of this article. And then you don’t delete it. You cut it out you put it in it’s in its own new document and you come back to it later. So, you need a thesis. You need something to give your article direction and shape.

And that leads to the next basic tool or step and that is you need an outline. You need some kind of map, general direction, or even just some landmarks that you’re using to get to where you’re going. And these will come out of having a thesis, okay. You will be able to outline your piece once you have an idea what it is you’re trying to argue.

And so, the outline asks the question, “How am I going to convince people of my thesis?” What are the big moving parts that are going to do that? Obviously, you know, we could use the cat here. There’s going to be an introduction and a conclusion and there’s going to be a body, but an outline will help you break up that body. I’m going to have two paragraphs. They’re each going to make separate points and how are those going to tie back into… How is it going to follow through into the conclusion, which is going to link back to my introduction, which is hopefully will have set up my thesis. Okay? So, you need a road a map.

In my first few years of Pastoral Ministry, I was serving a church in Durban. I shared an office with a guy who loved spider diagrams. I don’t know if you’ve seen those, but the main idea in the middle and then you draw the legs out. He loved them. They didn’t work for me, but they work for a lot of people. Some people like to just do headings, bullets and so when you sit down to write your article, you’ve got three headings, each with five bullets under them. And you’re simply fleshing that out to become your article. Okay?

Some people draw. I had a lecturer at College who taught, he used his pictures. On Friday and he said, “Go home and learn.” And we were all like, you know, “Learn what?” And it was, it showed me that there are many ways to outline thought, okay. But you need an outline. You need some directions.

Long before (Africa mentioned Google or Sat Nav) long before the glorious days of Google Maps, if you tried to go somewhere that you hadn’t been before, what you had to get before you left was a series of directions. Okay, get to the Caltex, go right, and go 20 kilometers down that road. Okay, go past the – in Cape Town there’s, everyone’s favourite landmark is called the Spotty Dog. It’s just a big white spotty dog in the one suburb – it’s very bizarre. But when you’re getting directions, you always bring the Spotty Dog into it somehow. You’re like, you know, “You won’t get to the Spotty Dog, you won’t see him, but that’s, you know, that’s how you know you’re going the right way!”

So, you need a set of directions and an outline functions in this way. It’ll also help you know when you’ve reached the end of what it is you’re trying to say so you know when to stop. And it’ll prevent you from going down the wrong road, to take the wrong turn, to end up in a cul-de-sac.

I’ve been driven around Joburg, and I was very grateful for that because everywhere I looked, I was like, “Wow, I could get lost here!” You know, this is a big place.

A set of directions, an outline, will help you to get to where you’re going. And so, with a thesis, you develop an outline, and then the third and fourth steps they flow out of this. You need an introduction, third, and you need a conclusion, fourth.

Introductions, well they introduce your article, right? They introduce what it is you’re going to try and say or do or convince your reader of. But more importantly than that, they really serve as the kind of orientation for everything else that is to come. They help the reader know what to anticipate and you, again, like a thesis statement, you can do this in lots of ways. An introduction doesn’t have to say: “In this article, I’m going to argue that Jesus is fully God and fully man. (I told you I don’t come up with good examples on the spot!) And we’re going to do that in three sections. In the first section…”

You don’t have to do that in an introduction, but you do need to set your reader, or at least align them with the direction that you’re going to take them. You can do that with a personal anecdote. You can do that with identifying a problem or a challenge or a question that’s been asked. You can pose your own question which you hope grabs the reader and their attention. You can make an observation and then riff off of that. You can start with a quote from someone else if you’ve been using the principles and you’ve been reading and engaging. You could say, “Oh, Marilyn Robinson said that good writing is like parsing the broken hearts of people and praising the loving heart of Jesus.” Okay, and then work from there. But an introduction sets up your article and, importantly, it orientates your reader. Okay? And it has to achieve that.

Fourthly, you need a conclusion. Good writing concludes well. There’s been a lot of memes recently for some reason, a lot of jokes on the internet, about music in the 60s and the 70s. (Sorry, Martin! That’s your…you know.) But the joke is always that music in the 60s and the 70s just kind of peters out, or worse, sometimes it just fades, you know. So, the guitar and the drums carrying going. The vocalists have stopped singing. And then you can just imagine the guy in the studio just slowly turning you’re down the master, you know, just sliding it down. And that’s how the song ends.

Articles shouldn’t end like that. They need to they need to wrap around and to bring your reader back to what it is you’ve set out to do, and then perhaps to pose something to them by way of implication, application, or conclusion.

If someone has reached the conclusion of your article, unless they’re topping and tailing, which is another way of reading, but if – let’s assume someone has read, they’ve got to the conclusion – it means they’ve read the rest. So, you can assume that they’re either on your side now or at least they are willing to entertain what it is you’ve set out to tell them. Ad so, the conclusion is then a great place for implication and action. Okay? They’ve tracked with you this far. That might be through just a short couple hundred-word reflection. That could be at the end of a couple of thousand words, but you’ve got them now here to your conclusion: use that. You’ve earned their trust, I think, if they’re reading the conclusion, and so use that to pose a challenge, to make a punchy conclusion to what it is you’ve been saying. So, finish strongly.

Fifthly, and just our last two now, and these are similar, you need to, you need to link the parts of what you’re writing together. Okay? Good writing will make use of paragraphs. That is, it won’t just be one big block of justified writing, you know, with no space to breathe. There will be short paragraphs, slightly longer paragraphs. But the challenge comes when you’re writing with more than one paragraph, is that these bits all need to make sense as a whole. And so, you need to – and the illustration I always use when I’m speaking to writers at Gospel Coalition – is that you need to actually take your reader by the hand and lead them through what it is you’re saying.

You don’t just, you know, if you think about taking someone into your home, you don’t just walk in the front door and say, “Right, here’s my house,” and then you, and then hope that they will be able to find their way to, you know, where you want them to be. No, you take them in. You say, “Well, this is, you know, we’re going to eat dinner here.” And then after dinner you say, “Okay, we’ve finished. We’re going to go and we’re going to sit down here or we’re going to go back to the kitchen. We’re going to make a cup of tea.” You know, you take your reader with you, and you link the parts together. You link the paragraphs. You link your introduction.

When you get to conclusion, it shouldn’t just kind of drop out of thin air but rather should make a lot of sense. Good writing will transition well between the parts. And so, take your reader by the hand as you move through them.

And one of the important things to do here is, as you linking, is you’re always looking back to – if we use the kind of directions illustration again – is to your big landmark, which is your thesis statement. Okay? You’re always going, okay, you’re finishing this paragraph of, you know, I’ve made an argument of my case, how does this link with what’s to come? But also, does this or how does this tie back to what I’ve set out to achieve in this article?

Finally, integrating your quotes. There are other steps, there are little dance steps to learn if you are to write well, but I think this is a good one to finish with because many of us will be doing this as we write, particularly with Scripture, but not only with Scripture, is that to integrate the work of someone else. And this isn’t always as easy as you would think. It can often be quite a jarring experience for readers, you know. They’re going with you through the paragraph and then suddenly your sentence ends, colon, and then you, you know, then there’s just this quote. And they’re going, “Oh!” You know? And so really to integrate quotes, it’s very simply a setting up and link and following and reintegrating at the end.

So, it’s, you know, we’ve been thinking about the 6 basic steps for writing now as, well let’s just pick someone, as Jeffrey, I don’t know if Jeffrey’s here, but we’ll just use his name. But as Jeffrey famously said, “If you are to be a good writer, you need to master some of the basics.” And then, we come out of the quote, and we say, “And so, I hope that by now you have understood and perhaps locked some of these basic principles and steps for writing better.”

That would actually be a great place to finish my talk. It wasn’t really scripted like that but I’m like, “Wow! I should have, I could have… that would have been really good!”

You need to set up your quotes. You need to integrate them into what you’re saying. And then you need to come out of them and again not just jump straight back into what as you’re saying. And often as you do this, what you realize is that you maybe don’t need to quote, you can actually just paraphrase what the person says. Still cite them, as we said at the beginning. Don’t not cite your sources. But often just a paraphrase of a dense paragraph in a book is better than asking your reader to now take a step to the side and change gear, read something long, and go and then get back into what it is you’re saying. So, I’m not saying don’t use quotes, but if you do, you’ve got to help your reader understand why and what they’re there for.

Make Progress by Writing

Now I could say many more things and about each of these we could say more as well. And maybe later we can discuss them on the panel. But I want to finish with a few words from one of the greatest writers in the Christian tradition, Saint Augustine. In one of his kind of lesser-known works, a peculiar book as well, called “The Retractions”, he said this. He said, “I’m the sort of man who writes because he has made progress and I’m the sort of person who makes progress by writing.”

A wonderful sentence and you can understand in a few different ways. Obviously, Augustine is saying that as he wrote, he learned, he made progress as he wrote and he had to keep writing as he got older because he was making progress, okay? The book, the first book that he wrote, is not a book that he looked back fondly on. He, and that’s why he wrote his retractions, actually to revise everything he had done and to revisit it and to perhaps say it slightly differently. That’s one way. But sorry, that’s a lot. Why I think this quote’s great is because it, the point, is simply true there. The point is true of the craft and practice of writing: to become those who make progress at it simply by doing it. Be someone who makes progress in your writing by becoming someone who writes.