I clipped the maps, buildings, and grids in this colorful paper collage from a community theatre prospectus that I picked up in Lucerne, Switzerland on the way to my annual Mountain Rise writing retreat. (What an amazing week that was!) The two appliquéd birds graced a postcard that I purchased in early June at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and I cut out the two Swiss chalets from a tourist brochure advertising tours of a chocolate factory.

Together, these images represent many different kinds of structure: textual, textural, architectural. And what better way to invoke the varied structures of scholarly writing — and to launch my new 6-week focus on Structure — than with a riotous array of straight lines and curved lines, buildings and birds, maps and metaphors?

In early July 2024, in addition to launching ‘Structural Metaphors’ (a 6-week Swordcraft series exploring metaphors for structuring six key aspects of your scholarly writing) and the Structure Sequence of the Live Writing Studio, I also hosted a free 2-hour Special Event all about structure! There I took attendees through a series of strategies for finding the best structure for a current book, thesis, article, chapter, or any other writing project they wanted to focus on. The aim was to create a new structural design by the end of the session. 

If you missed this live Special Event, you can register below for the free recording of the live session, or read the highlights below. Enjoy!

Here’s WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of the live event:

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This session was such a treat! Helen coached the attending writers through an interactive structure exercise, with just 30 scraps of paper and 30 minutes. If you’re working on a book or a thesis with many different facets or chapters, this workshop is for you! (Click the green button above to receive the video link). This workshop was great for experimenting with new arrangements, hierarchies, and ways of thinking. Helen also asked us to consider metaphors to invoke new sets of ideas: What would happen if I think about my book or article as a tree? or a city? or a map?

There are, of course, several fantastic tools for a more linear structural organisation (if that floats your boat) — for example, Helen mentioned how to ‘outline’ your structure, revealed tricks for using Scrivener, and recommended Margy Thomas’s ‘fractal structure’, which helps keep sections consistent in length and depth. But it’s worthwhile exploring non-linear tools, too, such as radial mind-mapping using color, metaphor, and sketches. Helen encouraged us to consider how we might approach a linear artefact such as a book using a non-linear structure to give the reader multidimensional ways to read it. (Challenging, but not impossible!) For a great example, take Helen’s book Writing with Pleasure, which was structured like a mosaic mirror—you really don’t need to read this book in a set order. Or Douglas Hofstadter’s book: Gödel, Escher, Bach, which subdivides chapters in a playful way.

It was wonderful to hear the comments from each of the attendees at the live workshop and their takeaways. Helen mentioned that it’s useful to understand the differences between stages of structuring your writing. Ideation (the inception of an idea, the spark that ignites the creative flow), leads to conceptualization (which refines the raw idea into an overall plan), and builds an architecture of ideas (which organises the information). Workshops like this one walk you through these stages, and then you can use metaphor and linear tools to solidify the direction of your project. Interestingly, the more seemingly unstructured or non-linear the topic, the more it lends itself to really strong structural thinking!

A big thank you to Helen for this very helpful Special Event and a warm welcome to all the new writers who joined us. I hope to see you all again at the next Live Writing Studio.

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can find the recording of the Special Event in their Video library.  

Not a member? Register to receive an email with a link to the video of the first hour.

Better yet, join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources as part of your membership plan.

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During the first week of May, I invited writers to join me for two free online Writer’s Diet Clinics, in which we discussed how to cook up delicious, nourishing prose for your readers to savor!

If you missed this event, you can register below for the free 25-minute Writer’s Diet Tutorial video, recorded during the live clinic on May 8. In the tutorial, you will learn about the online Writer’s Diet Test and my premium Writer’s Diet PLUS tool for WriteSPACE members.

Here’s WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of the live event:

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In the first hour of each session, Helen guided participants through a brief Writer’s Diet tutorial to introduce her free online Writer's Diet diagnostic tool and its younger, more sophisticated sibling, the Writer’s Diet app for MS Word. (Some seasoned WD users could opt to spend that time doing a 25-minute pomodoro instead). In the second hour, Helen ran a live writing clinic to help the writers make sense of their Writer’s Diet test results.

The Writer’s Diet is an excellent diagnostic tool; I use it regularly for my own writing. You can paste in a text sample of anywhere from 100 to 1000 words to get a diagnosis, which is split into different categories. If you get a diagnosis of ‘Heart Attack’ or similar, the results will light up with rainbow colours, indicating you have many editing options available. In the case of this tool, the more colour you see, the more your verbal arteries are being clogged (metaphorically speaking, of course).

I love that you can filter by specific categories with the test. You click on each box, and it will give you the diagnosis just for that category. Helen offered some golden advice for this test: Take it with a little pinch of salt. Remember that it’s an algorithm, and you are the style expert of your own work. It’s easy to assume that you must eliminate all of those coloured problem words—which would be difficult and unnecessary. You don’t have to remove them all, but it does teach you about your default word selection. I tend to towards ‘misty’ with be-words, something that I always check for! Using a lot of be-words can mean too many passive verb constructions. So when I revise, I remove ‘is’ and introduce active and robust verbs to drive my writing forward.

If you have yet to take the test, I hope you’ll enjoy exploring its many insights. And don’t forget to watch Helen’s tutorial via the green link above. A big thanks to Helen for hosting these two wonderful sessions. I look forward to seeing you all at the next WriteSPACE special event!

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can find the recording of the Writer’s Diet Tutorial in their Video library.  

Not a member? Register to receive an email with a link to the video of the first hour.

Better yet, join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources as part of your membership plan.

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At some point in your writing life, you may have been given well-meaning advice spelled out via the acronym KISS:  

Keep It Simple, Stupid!

Personally, I refuse to dishonor intelligent, hardworking writers with such a mean-spirited harangue. Keep It Short and Simple – fair enough.  By why throw in that gratuitous Stupid?

As an alternative, I've come up with the formulation KISS don't TELL: 

Keep It Stylish, Sunshine!
don't
Turn Everything Long and Laborious

Earlier this week, as a writing warm-up at my weekly Virtual Writing Studio, I invited participants to spell out their own versions of KISS don't TELL – or, if they preferred, to propose creative variations. As usual, they came up with some wonderfully inventive and playful responses:

• KISS don't TELL: Keep It Sharp and Simple; don't Take Enjoyment, Let the reader Live in the writing! (Jennifer, Australia)

• KISS don't TELL: Kindle Inquiry, Suggest Satisfaction; don't Torture Everyone with Lengthy Lines (Anita, South Africa)

• CRISP don't SPELL: Create, Return, Inspire, Shape, Play; don't be Serious, Prohibit, Evaluate, Lonely, Loathe (Nina, Australia)

• KISS don't TELL: Keep It Short and Simple; don't use Tremendously Elegant Luxury Language (Hannah, UK)

• KISS don't TELL:
  
  Keep
  In mind that you are
  Smart with your genuine creativity
  Start to write anytime anywhere
  
  do not
  
  Think too much but
  Enjoy your writing with your own
  Language and make your meaningful
  Legacy on earth
  
  (Grace, Texas, USA)

Excellent advice all round! 

However, I'm well aware that Keeping It Short, Sharp, Smart, and Simple is not such a simple matter — especially when we feel pressured to impress our peers by Turning Everything Long and Laborious and Torturing Everyone with Lengthy Lines.

That's why I've devoted much of my adult life to writing books, developing online tools, and facilitating workshops, courses, and retreats for academic and professional writers who want to let the sunshine in but can't quite figure out how. If you're ready for another shot at that elusive KISS, this website offers an array of targeted resources for you to try.

Writing clear, elegant, engaging prose is a craft that anyone can learn — and I'm here to help you. You may wish to start by taking my “What’s Your Writing Roadblock?” quiz.

Keep It Stylish, Sunshine!  

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I couldn't resist using a pair of pinking shears to create this paper collage, in homage to my recent WriteSPACE Special Event guest Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor in Psychology at Harvard University.

The English verb pink, which dates back to the 14th century, means "pierce, stab, make holes in."  But the purpose of pinking shears is not destructive -- quite the opposite.  The zigzag pattern of the blades prevents woven cloth from fraying and produces a decorative edge reminiscent of the common garden flowers called pinks.  

Steven Pinker's prose style, likewise, is incisive yet elegant, hole-punching yet healing, piercing yet humane.  Whether you know him as a distinguished psycholinguist, a fearless social commentator, a consummate prose stylist, or all of the above, I hope you'll be as pleased as I was that he gave up an hour and a half of his precious sabbatical leave to visit us in the WriteSPACE on May 4.

In the first 90 minutes of this live 2-hour Special Event, I engaged Steve in a wide-ranging conversation about his background and evolution as a writer, his personal and professional sense of style, and -- with a nod toward his most recent book, Rationality -- the role of rationality in academic and professional writing.  The final half hour featured a hands-on “reverse engineering” workshop inspired by his 2015 book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.  

Here are some comments made by last week's Virtual Writing Studio participants about the Pinking Shears collage, before I revealed that it had anything to do with Steven Pinker:

• Marie (Texas, USA):
  Crafting, assembling, designing… Piece by piece, square by square, a mission is underway and a new world unfolds. We will wake up to a newly fashioned environment; not a moment too soon.

• Nina (Brisbane, Australia):
  A wedding planner swimming! Karen Barad's agential realism uses the concept of "cut-together-apart."

• Lorna (Scotland, UK):
  I like the jigsaw-like qualities of the pinked edges.

• Lynne (Brighton, UK):
  The serration creates more edge surface on the blade, which concentrates its cutting power. Compacted, it does more.

• Anita (Cape Town, South Africa):
  Snipping work into bite sized chunks is a strategy to move work forward.

• Vicky (Essex, UK):
  It reminds me of how I edited my PhD -- I would restructure by printing out, cutting up, and sticking together.

• Hussain (Indonesia):
  Lies against purple background with its mouth wide open from exhaustion.

• Eva (Germany):
  Rethinking a journal article: the open scissors point different directions the article could go; the black frame for requiring a clear framework; and the paper fragments and flowers for playing around creatively with ideas.

• Ramón (Melbourne, Australia):
  It’s a puzzle, any piece can be matched with any other. Since they are all the same form, there is not just one solution.

And here is WriteSPACE member Nina Ginsberg’s lively account of the live event:

…………….

I found the discussion between Helen Sword and Steven Pinker insightful and inspiring. A few standout ideas for me were Steven’s observations that most writers don't consult style manuals, they consume good prose and devote attention to why it is good, clear and affecting writing – and by default these people assimilate an inventory of good writing. Another gem was Pinker’s comment that at university, it is not the undergraduates that are the ‘bad writers’, but the (post)grads, because they are often drawing on jargon from a small clique of scholars and need to ‘prove their work’ so it is often very hedged and qualified (that's me!). As a teacher, I was impressed with Pinker’s generosity in sharing his Rationality class materials. This made me reflect on alternative ways scholars, teachers and writers can share their work beyond mainstream publication. 

A few other takeaways I garnered were: that Pinker avoids using parenthetical; he is conscious that every new equation included in a book ‘cuts the readership in half’; he harnesses the power of well-placed jokes, humour and concrete, relatable, witty examples to highlight specific concepts...and as always...he knows the importance of having a good ending to paragraphs. At one stage, Pinker mused about the many spatial and temporal contours of prepositions (you fill in a form, but also fill a form out) and that ‘up’ has a completion and vertical ‘sense’ about it...what Pinker called a ‘spectral sense’. I enjoy listening in to other writers ‘think out loud’ like this my favorite example of this is a private recording of Dr Oliver Sacks trying to find the right words as he writes.* 

*In my draft of this piece, I had this phrase originally in parenthesis, but took it out as a homage to Pinker, but then realized I needed parenthesis if I were to include this annotation in-text, so I popped it here. (Oh, the irony!) ...and there they are again. - argghh! I tried Steven! Your ideas on writing continue to challenge me! NG.

Later on, the conversation turned to Pinker's writing process. He outlined his 6-stage drafting process which included a brain dump, a ‘frankenchapter’ (a term I love and will be using with relish!), sending it his mum to read as she is his trusted go to non-academic reader-feedbacker, then after a few more drafts, he does one last, slow edit for reasoning at the end to improve the prose. To wrap up, Steven shared a few sample texts and explained the deliberate techniques he embedded in the writing and organization. This metathinking about how writers use words, logic and literary devices is what keeps me coming back to WriteSPACE events like this!  

A big thanks to Helen and Steven for sharing their time, expertise and ideas so generously. If you did not attend or have not yet watched the recording, make a cup of tea, get comfortable and enjoy this wonderful discussion about writing and rationality. 

…………….

And a big thanks to you, Nina, for sharing your comments! A video of my conversation with Steven Pinker is now available for members in the WriteSPACE Library.

Not a member yet? Register here to receive an email with the video link.

Better yet, join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources.

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WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership plan (USD $15/month or $150/year).

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