: Re: How do I improve "beige" text? I have a tendency to write text that's on the "beige" side. I think it's the engineer in me that tends to write text that's very straightforward and strictly

@Yeniel532

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As others have said, find a balance between reading widely to observe the styles of other audiences and observing the world with your senses active.

I'd also like to add that the detail you give depends on the audience. Are you looking to write creative pieces, or improving your technical writing? I'd argue that the genre of writing dictates the level of detail you want to give. If you're writing, for example, a piece for intelligent layman, you'd write differently than, say, for experts in the field. To give an example, consider a popular book on infinity versus a textbook on ZFC axiomatic set theory. This is an extreme example, but I think it demonstrates the difference in style.

Related to that note, consider textbooks that you've read for courses that you've taken in the past. Each author, I'm sure, injects his or her own personality into the writing. Sometimes it can be helpful to offer a moment of levity when dealing with a heavy or complex topic. Also consider how description can provide an analogy for dealing with an abstract or highly technical concept. Being forced to describe these topics in an intuitive, everyday prose, I believe you'll see your vocabulary and style morph to suit that purpose.

You can apply these same ideas to creative writing, too. With creative writing, the language will admittedly be more flowery (at least most of the time), but the same strategies can be useful for conveying abstract ideas in a concrete manner filled with sensory detail. As you'll find, these skills transfer between any genre of writing.

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