The Basic Thing About Writing That Authors Always Get Wrong

So, here I am, reading a book about marriage like the good little Jewish girl I am, and I get annoyed. I always get annoyed while reading books, because authors are always doing the same thing wrong. I found this on Quora, I find it on Medium, and now I find it in books: authors don’t trust the intelligence of their own readers.

Let’s dissect this. What am I even saying? Well, when you’re reading something, it’s not hard to figure out what the important bits are; they jump out in your head whether you want them to or not. The most important sentences hang in the air after they’re read.

Case in point: look at the first two paragraphs I just wrote. In the first one, I bolded the last sentence as a cheap trick to point out what I wanted you to assign as important, like a glaring neon sign that says, “Look here!” But writing is about subtlety. The line that stuck out in a quiet — but still significant — way was the one at the end of my second paragraph. The one that wasn’t bolded. The one where you figured out that it was important, because of the way it was set up.

You know what assigns significance to pieces of information? Colons. M-dashes. Periods. Paragraphs. Those amazing, perfect, versatile pieces of punctuation and bits of writing that allow us humans to communicate. The simple things that seem, at first glance, to have no flair.

A new paragraph is dramatic.