How to Become A Good Writer in Our Generation of IDIOTS

Over the years, several people have asked me this same question: how do I become a good writer–like you?

And two days ago, another person I chat with asked again. The desire to become good at something as prestigious and enviable as ‘writing’ is understandable so I gave her my usual answer.

“Read more and write more.”

The “Read more” does not include reading things from Yaanom or the Amanfoa bloggers in Ghana–who write “am here, whiles blah blah.”When I read posts on a lot of the Ghanaian websites or blogs, I end up asking this same question: so an educated person wrote this…huh?

A lot of Ghanaians have degrees and yet they cannot write a page piece that would be deemed standard.

The culture of reading valuable materials, especially books has become extinct and our intellectually impaired generation is facing the consequence.

‘Boss Chicks,’ ‘Yaanom’ and ‘Slay Queens’ cannot put a single correct sentence together. The men are equally useless.

You do not see Ghanaians talk about books or post on books.

People waste so much time on Social Media: they do not make money from the waste and do not learn anything such as “reading and writing’ from here too.

No one was born a Shakespeare and Shakespeare himself was born a prolific writer. He read!

Christoper Hitchens wasn’t born with brilliant words and convoluted but intelligent sentences in his mouth. He became a great polemicist by reading and writing.

Ask our generation about anything important–be it history, cosmology, law, philosophy, biology, religion, economics and even art and they wouldn’t know.

You don’t need to study a disciple to know your way around it. An intelligent person self-teaches himself a little bit of almost everything.

This is a generation that will see a 2000-word article and without shame shout; “it’s too long–didn’t you learn summary in school.”

We’ve become, unapologetically, a generation of idiots.