Although I have posted more than 130 original articles on my public account and wrote a blog for more than ten years before writing my public account, I still feel that I can't write.
Most of the things I wrote before were technical articles or some summaries. I think it would be good to explain a technical point clearly and let people who don't understand it gain something. Even if it is not helpful to others, it can still be used as a memorandum for yourself.
None of this is written.
Therefore, when I saw many people turning on the computer and tapping quickly on the keyboard, beautiful text floated out between their fingers and appeared on the computer screen, I was very envious.
I am even more impressed when I see that some self-media people are not only very productive in addition to beautiful words.
In my opinion, the ability to write is divided into two parts:
Continuously have content to write;
Write content that makes people want to read.
Let's talk about my views on improving writing skills from these two aspects.
When I started writing a public account, I set myself a goal to post an article every week. It seemed simple, but it was very difficult to persist in the long term. The following is the data released by my public account in recent years:
2022 as of the end of April (21 articles)
2021 (37 articles)
2020 (28 articles)
2019 (27 articles)
From the data point of view, the goal has not been achieved every year, but it can be seen that it is developing in a good direction, and there is still high hope of achieving it this year.
I was very worried that there was no content to do before, and even when I wrote two articles in one weekend, I would leave one article until the next week. There is no such worry now, because I understand that if you want to have continuous output, you must have continuous input.
There are many ways to enter:
- Systematically learn new technologies and read books;
- The fragment time can be seen at Zhihu, Douban, headlines, public accounts, etc.;
You may feel that you have learned a lot and read a lot, but you just can't remember it when you use it. There are two very important reasons:
Important knowledge may be forgotten after closing the book without intensive reading and in-depth understanding;
There is no correlation between the knowledge learned.
Recently, I interviewed a backend developer and said that he liked to read books after work.
I asked,"What books have you read recently?"
"I just finished reading a book about Redis," the interviewer said.
I continued to ask: "Then tell me why Redis is single-threaded and is still so fast?"
Interviewer: ...
This shows that the interviewer only browsed through the book briefly, without taking questions to understand every knowledge point, so that he could not answer such an important question. This way of reading books based on quantity is not advisable.
During the intensive reading process, we understood the author's views and needed to summarize them in our own words and organize them in a textual manner. I now use floating ink to record these summaries. Using tags, annotations, and search, it is easy to find relevant records.
Our energy is limited. Not all books and information need intensive reading. For any field or technology, there will always be some classic books. For example, C#has "CLR via C#","C#in Depth", etc. These classic books need intensive reading. The knowledge points summarized from them form the backbone of the entire knowledge tree, and other books or fragments of time absorb content to fill the branches and leaves of the knowledge tree. I am used to using mind maps to organize this kind of knowledge tree.
In addition to the systematic learning and fragmented time absorption mentioned above, there is also a category that is easy to ignore, that is, some inspirations that burst out in our heads anytime and anywhere. If we are not recorded in time, it will be fleeting.
Currently, the method I use for content collection is:
Excerpts, opinions and thoughts during the reading process will be recorded in floating ink and labeled;
Organize the content in the floating ink in stages and place it into the mind map to form a knowledge tree;
Golden sentences and short stories I usually see on the Internet will also be collected in floating ink. For example, I saw management master Drucker say before: "You can't just bow your head and pull the cart without looking up at the road, and eventually forget your main goal.", so I saved it in floating ink and labeled it: Golden sentences, Management.
When you want to write an article, first determine a topic, then outline it in Typora, then search in Mind Map and floating ink based on keywords to find useful information, put it in Typora, add some connection and extra supplements, and an article will come out.
Up to now, I have only solved the problem of what to write, and I am still groping about how to write.
Do some reflection every day and write some summary words; you can express your opinions through text on hot news online; you can also use text to discuss them in the technical group; you can write some articles within the team for technical sharing, etc. Anyway, it is right to write more.
Writing is to allow readers to understand what we want to express, so the words should be concise and clear, and do not require a lot of gorgeous rhetoric to modify them, especially for technical articles.
Read more good articles and learn from the structure and usage of words. The words in "Erye Jianshu","MattTalk", and "Minority News" in the public accounts I pay attention to are simple, but they are very comfortable to read.
Do your own readers, before writing a blog, directly published after writing, now, WeChat public platform, published articles can only be very limited modification, so every time before publishing very cautious, after writing, will read it again, the sentence is not smooth place, wordy place timely adjustment, but also can find a lot of wrong characters.
Although the information on the Internet is rich now, it is full of a lot of low-quality information and repeated information. If you can insist on originality and write one thing clearly, you can already exceed a large number of people.
So, if you have content you want to express, write it, the carrier is not important, the form is not important, but hope to stick to it, and the rest is given to time.