Professional-Grade Writing

This is my brother Spencer. (He was also homeschooled). Spencer over the past few years has taken an interest in body-building, because he was a skinny kid growing up and felt like it stopped him from getting interest from girls. So, he decided to put an end to that and researched everything he could about body-building and anatomy and nutrition, and ended up gaining about 50 lbs and being in really good shape. People don't believe him when he says he was a tall scrawny kid that got picked on in middle school (for not going to middle school). Well, Spencer was dedicated and recorded every set and every bite of his journey, and has multiple notebooks filled with his records. He decided to compile it into a program to sell to people who have a hard time gaining weight, "hard-gainers", and also to people who want to start working out at the gym but have no idea where to start. He put together a draft of the program, complete with his story and the workout program and the diet, and sent it to me to look over. I've been closely following his program for about a month now and can already see results, and I'm getting more and more convinced that it's a product with value. I offered to help him with a more polished prototype that he can send out and get some attention with, and I've decided to give it a go tomorrow.

Thinking about how to polish Spencer's body-building guide has made me wonder about why it's so easy to pick out a poorly written document, but it's so hard to write a document that isn't poorly written. I mean, the average person can tell in less than a minute if a sales pitch they're reading or a published article is professional quality, yet there are very few people who actually know how write professionally. I feel like part of this comes from our education system, where academic writing is taught by highschool teachers who care more about big vocabularies and flowery sentences than actual content or style. I learned how to write in that extravagant, boring style in my one semester of highschool, and even though I was good at it I couldn't stand reading anything I'd written for the class. BYU seems to have a lot of this academic influence, and it comes out any time students have writing assignments. The sentences are long, the flow is complicated, and the words are reminiscent of Pride and Prejudice. Although those papers get high points in the standard English courses, the same styles applied in real-world writing mark a person as immature and amateur. People don't like to read things that are boring! So, writing effectively is as much of an art and talent as it is an academic science, and it's important to learn how to use both effectively.