How do we become better writers?

It's been just over a year since I taught my last course on reporting and writing at Stanford, and I miss teaching. Throughout the 20 or so years I taught journalism at U-C, Berkeley, SFSU, down on The Farm, by far the most FAQ by students was the one posted in the title field above.

Over the coming weeks, I'll post a series of suggestions. Tonight, as a followup to yesterday's piece about technology's effect on writing, and other work, I have one simple piece of advice that can be used by anyone.

Email.

An email exchange with the right recipient is perfect for improving your writing voice. The reasons lie at the intersection between the nature of email experience and the nature of the writing process.

When I first got into email, I called it "talk-writing" or "write-talking." It was a new communication form, combining elements of the arts of conversation and letter-writing. Living somewhere around the midpoint of an imaginary spectrum connecting those two ancient forms, email opened up an ancient struggle for hegemony.

Since Gutenberg, the printed word has held the balance of power over the more ancient form of oral tradition.

Suddenly, email rerighted the balance. It's less formal, more spontaneous, and much more interactive than publishing or letter writing. It's less intimate than conversation face to face.

(IM and chat represent email on steroids. I'll get to them another time.)

Last week, J used this method to produce the first draft of a piece we are coauthoring about the ongoing FEMA scandals in post-Katrina Mississippi. Here is how she described our process:

"So... I'll try to write what I think, then if you want you can edit it etc. I'm going to just write it like an email to you. This is complete stream of consciousness, so have fun with it..."

Most people feel more comfortable just letting it go in email, whereas they might freeze up when they try to write in a more formal way. For me, as an editor, it is easier to pull writing out of a person via email than to deal with an awkwardly structured draft.

My goal is to help the writer develop some narrative form of story telling, probably based on visual cues and other descriptive triggers. By using email, she is more relaxed, and sends me information in a form that includes explaining to me what she thinks it means. She's not worrying about an audience larger than one. So she lets it fly.

That what writers learn to do -- how to become less inhibited with language and let it fly.

This is only an initial attempt to answer the question in my title. I promise to add more soon.