Want to write well? So take a look at these 6 tips from a Harvard expert.

It doesn't matter if you are a college entrance exam, if you are finishing your TCC or if you already work and pay your bills without having to ask anyone for help: at some point in your life you probably had to write an essay, a letter, an article or whatever. another thing. Writing is not easy and there are people out there who can't put ideas on paper, so how about learning some tips to make this process easier?

Time magazine has published an article with advice from Steven Pinker, a psychologist, linguist, and writer who works at Harvard University and is among the top 100 psychologists today. Pinker has listed a few simple exercises that are sure to improve the quality of whatever you want to write. Good luck!

1 - Be visual and direct

A third of the human brain works with vision, so it is critical to make the reader really visualize what you are writing. Pinker explains that for the reader to go from "I think I understand" to "I understand" he needs to have a broad view of what is written. "Many experiments have shown that readers understand and remember a much better subject when it is expressed in concrete language that allows them to form visual images."

Another interesting fact, not now about the visual side of writing, but about this concept of being straightforward, is that many people think that to write well you need to use complex words. The truth is that it is already scientifically proven that the use of complex language has nothing to do with intelligence.

When information is easy for our brain to process, it is thought to be more reliable than that of far-fetched text that needs to be read several times. The key, therefore, is to think about who will read your text as a person just like you. If your intention is to impress, your reader may feel dumb and that is one of the worst things your writing could do. Do you know that “less is more” story? Yeah.

2 - Mastering a subject is not necessarily a good thing

The human brain is full of strange tricks and in some cases this results in self sabotage. When you have a high level of knowledge about a subject, you may find it so obvious that when you write about it, you leave some important detail aside. The problem is that your reader may not master the subject as much as you do, and to him your text will seem incomplete.

Pinker calls this phenomenon "the curse of knowledge, " which is nothing more than our difficulty in understanding that our reader may not know the subject we are talking about and know so well. A good way to solve this problem is to have a person read your text and tell you if you understand everything.

Some studies have already proven that we tend to be more confident than we should be when we talk about a subject we have mastered. This extreme confidence can mislead us about the clarity of what we are writing. When in doubt, always ask someone's opinion.

3 - Get to the point

Most traditional journalistic texts are built on a scheme called lead or lead, which is nothing more than the practice of offering key information early on. In the newspaper, this is because often the text needs to be edited and, in order not to risk cutting out important information in the last paragraph, the lead proposes that the main points be at the beginning of the text.

To write a text with a good lead, make sure that it answers the following questions in the first few paragraphs: Who? When? Like? Where? Why? What? It sounds complicated, but it's quite simple. To prove it, let's make up a story here:

The clown Inácio (who) made a presentation (what) this Friday, 31 (when) at a school in Curitiba (where) in celebration of Halloween (why). After recalling folk songs (like), hundreds of children began to cry compulsively.

If this strange text continued, we would talk more about the clown, about the school, the children, and the community crying. The reader would continue reading even though he already knew what had happened. There is therefore no need to suspense at the beginning of your text. Cut to the chase.

It is important to remember that this lead technique is ideal for journalistic writing, and it was remembered by Pinker to make us better understand the importance of not doing too much suspense before getting to the main subject of the text.

4 - Understand that language evolves

Of course you must have command of the language to write a text. What Pinker recommends is not to be a slave to the cultured norm and try to understand that language is constantly changing and adapting. This is not to say that you should write slang-filled text in an entrance exam essay, but you don't have to be very traditional either.

Machado de Assis and Gregório Duvivier are two Brazilian writers. Both have great texts, but the writing of each is completely different - in this sense, factors such as epoch and literary style also influence. The comparison is precisely to show that language evolves and that perhaps Duvivier would not be as successful if he wrote as Machado.

When it comes time to pursue your style, do not stick to the conventional. That's why the texts here at Mega Curioso tend to be more relaxed: for information, but in a lighter and easier to understand way.

5 - To write, you need to read

Just as you need to eat a lasagna to make you want to make an equally tasty lasagna, so writing good text requires reading good text. No one begins to write well overnight, simply typing endlessly and creating spectacular works.

Reading a lot will make you punctuate your texts better, learn more things, increase your vocabulary and get more creative. How about starting today?

6 - Review

Don't expect your text to look good on the first try - it rarely happens. It is important to always reread what you have written yourself, and to do so, just find your rhythm: there are those who like to reread paragraph by paragraph and also who likes to reread the text only after it is finished. The important thing is never to deliver or publish anything without proofreading.

In the review, we see if there is no punctuation problem, if there is no way to speak better about a subject, if a particular word has not been used many times in the same sentence, etc.

Chistian Rudder talks about the importance of proofreading and text editing using Twitter as a positive example, after all the user needs to be concise and straightforward when posting a message using a maximum of 140 characters. So if you're one of those who think technology makes us dumb, know that it's not right around.

Writer Mark Twain once wrote a letter to a friend, apologizing for writing too much and claiming he didn't have time to write a shorter letter. See? It just proves that being concise and straightforward takes effort.

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So, what did you think of these tips? Do you think about putting any of them into practice? Tell us in the comments!