Feelings and Attitudes about Writing

Our feelings and attitudes about writing have a powerful effect on our ability to write.

If we have negative feelings about writing, such as if we are afraid of writing because we are afraid we will write badly and people will think badly of us and our writing, it will be very difficult for us to write. However, if we can relax and allow ourselves to write without worrying about how well we write, it will be easier for us to write.

Sometimes our own fear of writing is the biggest problem we have with writing. If we can let ourselves write without fear because we understand that no one writes perfectly, we can more easily put our ideas into writing so that we can more easily look at and think more about our ideas.

Good writers fix their writing after they get their ideas into writing. When we first begin writing our ideas, the writing is usually messy and disorganized and full of errors. This is true for the best writers, including professional writers.

In order to produce good writing, we need to feel free to do bad writing first. We often find a few good ideas mixed in with our bad writing. Then we can take the few good ideas and work with them to make them clearer, to explain more, and gradually to develop a good piece of writing.

We do not have to decide what our main point will be and write an outline before we begin to write an essay. Some people make an outline later, after they have done some messy writing to discover what they want to say.