It took me a good eight years before I shuffled off the chains of academic writing. Make no mistake: the way they teach you to write in school will hamper you in the real world. In academia, you get rewarded for obscurity, density, paragraphs and sentences that stretch on in endless blocks of mind-numbing text. You quote lots of other people to make your own work sound authoritative, and you try to use as many words as possible so that you can get in the full 1500 words without running out of things to say.

In the real world, things are different. The fewer words, the better. Complex sentences are out. Short paragraphs are in.

In the real world, you get points for sounding punchy. You get to be the one coining quotable phrases. And you don’t have to cite every damn authority you used to research your article (although you should ideally keep a record of it).

I remember reading out one essay I was particularly proud of to my mother. I was a senior in college at the time, and I thought I was pretty hot stuff. I was graduating summa cum laude after all, I’d done honors for three years, and I had my pick of grad schools. I was taking an essay-writing class where we were rewarded for pushing boundaries, and my theme was the environment.

I was so proud of that essay, but I remember nothing of it other than that one still moment in the car. My mother was driving me back home from college, and I was reading the essay aloud. I kept stumbling over words as I read, wondering why things didn’t sound as good spoken as they had in my head. When I finished, my mother said, “Uh huh.”

She hated it.

And so I learned. What teachers love isn’t the same as what the layman will read. Rather than “dumbing down” writing to the average reader’s 8th grade reading level, you’re actually called to greater heights by expressing what you want to say in simpler terms. It’s like poetry. Although you’d think that strict rhythmic or rhyming structures would limit you, they actually spur you to greater creative genius.

Perhaps the most important thing I ever did for my development as a writer was to leave school while the getting was good. University gave me an ego, an unintelligible vocabulary, and high-falutin’ ideas that would hamper me when it came to communicating with normal, everyday people. I only matured as a writer when I spent time in the working world of laborers who spoke with an intuitive sense of story, pacing and rhythm. Their way of speaking would inform my writing for the next decade.