At a recent job interview, I was thrown a curveball of a question: “Who are your favorite nonfiction and fiction writers?”

Now, I’m a journalist by trade and a student by early mornings and nights. My limited free time is usually spent reading Refinery29’s Money Diaries, New York Times Magazine articles, Columbia Journalism Review profiles, and an ever-growing stack of New Yorkers. I rarely take notice of the byline over the headlines.

When I repeated the question to a professor of mine a few weeks after the interview, I tacked on that I spent much more of my time reading thick history tomes for class, rather than curling up with hot chocolate and a good fiction book. I didn’t have time to invest in a meaty fiction book. He didn’t have any of it.

“My task for you in the next few weeks before you graduate is to go to one of the bookstores in town and buy five fiction books,” he said, peering down at me like I was a child. “And read all of them before you graduate.” The implication was to take note of what I liked and didn’t like.

Like a good student ignoring her real homework, I set forth on my journey. I’d bought a book by Bich Minh Nguyen when I was in Seattle over spring break, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner.  I devoured Stealing Buddha’s Dinner over two days, jotting down notes in a small blue notepad about what I liked. Nguyen introduces an idea or anecdote at the beginning of the chapter, goes off on a tangent, then circles back to it in the end. I also remembered what I didn’t like in fiction writing. True to the nature of fractured recollection of childhood and hardship, the chapters were hardly linear, jumping between when she was 5, 10, then 7 as she remembers different parts of her life.

While a non-chronological retelling is typically the bane of my existence as a reader, I was inspired by Nguyen’s decision to do so because of its similarities to journalism. In journalism, you stick to the inverted pyramid format, where the most important points take priority over a chronological recap. Nguyen did something similar with her work, revealing aspects of her childhood in a way that contextualizes her decisions.

I’ve been drawing the same kind of inspiration in the nonfiction world from staffers at the Atlantic, New Yorker, and New York magazine. A summer ago, I began my internship at San Francisco Magazine and fell in love with seemingly endless ways to craft a narrative. My scavenger hunt for unique writing styles led me to compelling female writers like Jia Tolentino of the New Yorker and Jessica Pressler of New York magazine.

Pressler’s most recent work for The Cut, New York‘s online women’s vertical, is a riveting story about a grifter named Anna Delvey, who cons her way into the semi-elite circles of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. While the subject herself is compelling, it is Pressler’s precise delivery that sells the story. Through a series of detail-filled retellings, I slowly built a grasp of who Delvey is and why she did what she did. At the beginning of the piece, I had no idea what Delvey is up to, and I wasn’t quite sure why I should care. Yet little by little, Pressler convinced me that this woman’s story was intriguing and unlike any other I had read before, even in my wildest fiction fantasies.

Unlike Nguyen’s work, Pressler’s story was semi-chronological, pinpointing the moment that Delvey first step foot in the hotel lobby that would come to be her home and ending with her surprising fall from grace. But even in the vivid descriptions of Supreme clothing and facials that cost more than three quarters’ of textbooks, I found purpose in every sentence Pressler cranked out. I rallied against the overuse of quotes in a podcast with fellow Professional Writing – Editing minor Jeremy Levine, and yet Pressler flipped my beliefs upside down by proving that every quote is a brushstroke in a painted portrayal of Delvey’s life. The story hovers around 7,800 words of pure narrative.

It’s funny to me that I like Nguyen’s and Pressler’s writing styles so much. As a journalist, I pride myself on writing succinct, clean copy. The most important point comes first. The quotes are for colorful enrichment. If it isn’t necessary to the readers’ understanding of the issue, it doesn’t belong.

And yet, Nguyen, Pressler, and so many more authors out there have mastered the technique of suspenseful storytelling. (It helps that both of them were either excellent self-editors or had such geniuses at their disposal, because the lack of typos make the pieces so easy to read.) They’ve developed the kind of writing I want to emulate some day: one where every word, even the most frivolous of them, has its purpose in a story.

That deep desire to become a better storyteller is born out of my decade-old dream to become a novelist chronicling the lives of the upper middle class and 1%. My brief brushes with creative writing have always stagnated with the same conclusion: I write a lot, but how often do I write with a clear end goal in mind? News writing has come so naturally to me because the challenge is to get to the point, but writing creatively as a journalist and hopeful novelist is much harder to get right. Using my powers of observation to glean those methods from other writers, though, will change that.

I’m still only one book into my five-book reading list (sorry, Paul), but I’ve already noticed more purpose and clarity in story outlines and writing structures. I’m learning to deviate from the rigid lines of journalism’s inverted pyramid format to pursue more narrative-driven stories. The last time I did something this scary was when I packed my bags and moved to San Francisco for an unpaid internship. Fear, though, drove me to the greatest heights when following my ambitions, and the resulting inspiration will keep me there.

Unedited writing horrifies me. Not because it’s typically really bad, but because it shows a lack of care for the work people put out there.

It goes along with my thoughts on millennial media — people are more in need of good editors than they are of places to write. For mediums where there are no editors, though, people should really make a better effort to produce self-edited work.

This irritates me beyond belief even outside of my editorial stewardship at The Bottom Line, where I’m loath to receive articles and photo captions that haven’t been through a simple spellcheck. I’m a freelance writer and Yelp reviewer as well, and I see a lot of poorly proofread pieces on other mediums. Yelp is perhaps the biggest offender, because it’s a self-publish review website, and for some unknown reason, people don’t think about the conventions of grammar when typing up horror stories about Starbucks baristas.

Take these two reviews, for example. In the first one, a Yelper reviews a restaurant/banquet hall she visited for a birthday party.

 The pros: it’s short and sweet. The cons: it’s a little too short. With the exception of the last sentence, every clause is a fragment that offers a vague description of what the place is about. The final sentence is still a doozy: it’s missing an apostrophe, there’s an accidental double space, and it’s a run-on without a period.

The second review is much longer and more descriptive than the first review, but it falls short in spelling and punctuation. The author fails to capitalize street names and business names, but capitalizes non-proper nouns. There are also some common misspellings in the review, such as ‘kf’ in place of ‘of’, and ‘reccomend’ instead of ‘recommend.’ Other misused phrases/words include ‘likewise to’ and ‘standout.’ Like the previous author, this writer also forgets to double-check for fragments, missing verbs, and sentences missing periods.

While the third review is briefer than its predecessor, the author really packs a punch with the word choices she makes. The sentences are, for the most part, intact and independent clauses. Although much more inspiring than the other reviews, she frequently repeats words and mixes present and past tense. Only about halfway in did I finally realize that the writer had nothing to say about the food or drink itself, other than describing the agua fresca as “yummy.” The writer also goes on a wild tangent about expiration dates that appears to have no actual relation to anything about the joint. Was she talking about agua fresca? Who knows.

I frequently run into these problems on Yelp. These are actually pretty good reviews in comparison to what I’ve seen floating around the website, but I picked them for this blog post because they exemplified two different styles of writing. They’re also both totally salvageable pieces.

How do you fix pieces like these? The method itself is simple: by typing your unedited work into a word processor like Microsoft Word or Google Docs, you have unlimited access to spellcheck. Spellcheck is one of a computer’s greatest features, in my opinion. It underlines all your misspellings and fragments as you type, turning your document into a horrific mix of RGB colors until you resolve each problem. The F7 key will even tell you why you’re wrong so you can avoid the problem in the future. (Honestly, the pope should canonize spellcheck.)

Reading your writing aloud is also crucial to identifying fragments and missed parts of speech. We all know where we want to pause when we talk. We know when a sentence just doesn’t sound quite right. By

With time, your spelling and grammar skills can get better. Take it from me — English is my second language, technically. I still constantly mix up Chinese and English grammatical conventions and Google “subject-verb agreement” to make sure that I’m speaking correctly.

What’s harder, though, is convincing people that they should take pride in publishing well-written work. My argument is simple: when you publish a piece riddled with errors and filled with tangents, your reader has less incentive to trust you. So if you’re reviewing a coffee shop on Yelp, you’re clearly trying to convince people to either try or avoid the establishment.

“But why bother?,” you might argue. “They’re going to read it and get my point anyway. It’s just Yelp, chill.”

You’re right — it is just Yelp, which restauranteurs and food writers alike denounce for its subjective reviews. The problem, though, is that when over 70 million unique visitors troll Yelp for the hottest eats, your words can make a difference. Even if the platform is about the businesses in the end, it certainly doesn’t help them if the people who say it’s good have a questionable literacy level. And if your point is that the business sucks, well, people are less likely to believe someone who misspells “chow mein” as “ciao main.” If you don’t have an apparent understanding of what the restaurant is or what service a business provides, you probably shouldn’t be trusted.

People should — and do — care about their reputation online. Think about how carefully some of us curate our social media accounts, or how selective some are about what kind of work is published online. Just because Yelp is more ‘fun’ and ‘casual’ than an academic essay doesn’t give it any less meaning. In fact, its worldwide impact should really show its importance over a paper.