Academic Writing vs. Real World Writing

After years and years of English classes, essays, papers, and exams, I still couldn’t imagine myself as a writer. That is, before I started realizing what writing means in the real world. The kind of writing we’ve been taught in school is academic writing. The thing is, I am not very good at it, and it doesn’t work so well in the real world either.

I found this article on blogging. It’s a great read.

The biggest mistake we can make is not putting our readers first. I am learning this in the process of writing this post. I was going to post my personal reflection on the points he raised, but I realized I didn’t really add anything useful. It’s a (bad) habit I picked up from school I suppose, the urge of trying to paraphrase everything and assume someone would want to read that.

In the real world, our readers are not our professors or TAs.