Scribbled Sentences A writing lesson from Charles Darwin

I recently came across this quotation from Charles Darwin, and it immediately resonated with me.

There seems to be a sort of fatality in my mind leading me to put at first my statement or proposition in a wrong or awkward form.

Formerly I used to think about my sentences before writing them down; but for several years I have found that it saves time to scribble in a vile hand whole pages as quickly as I possibly can, contracting half the words; and then correct deliberately.

Sentences thus scribbled down are often better ones than I could have written deliberately.

Credit: Charles Darwin

My best writing, at least in my opinion, is when I dictate a stream of words into a little app called Captio on my iPhone to be turned into text and emailed into Evernote. Later, I will come back and clean up the text, often using Grammarly to pick up and correct my lousy punctuation and grammatical habits.

The process works beautifully for me, and like Darwin, I think what I write in this way comes out far better than if I had written it deliberately in a more traditional manner.

You will find more about Darwin’s information collecting and writing habits in this blog post.

Conversation Is Action

The Journey