How to come up with writing assignments

When I was studying computer science back at university, I was constantly challenged by homework assignments. Most of these assignments I would never do on my own, but I'm glad I did them while studying (I'm talking about you, polynomial time reduction). This is because the most effective learning happens in a sweet spot where what you are doing is challenging enough to strain you, but not too challenging so that it feels impossible. The assignments I worked on while studying provided this sweet spot perfectly. Therefore, if you are learning something by yourself, one key to make it more effective is to come up with your own assignments. Here are some ideas on how to do that.

If you already have some experience with writing, you will know some areas in your writing where you are not as good as you'd like. Maybe you are overusing certain phrases, or tend to fall back into using a certain style you don't like. I for one, struggle with always coming back to a genre of writing I don't really like. The first step for effective learning is to pick the issue that, once solved, will have the biggest positive impact on your writing. Then, focus on it and ignore the rest for now. You'll come back to the other issues later.

One piece of advice for finding issues in your writing, which I have ignored so far, is to hire an editor. An editor will be able to analyse your writing much more dispassionately.

You have picked one thing to focus on. Now start to brainstorm assignments that serve to alleviate it.

This is how I decided to start a daily blog. I struggled with perfectionism and endless fiddling with my posts without really improving them. So I forced me to publish something every day, not giving myself the chance to fiddle as much.

A good assignment focuses on the single thing you want to improve and holds everything else constant. For example, let's say you want to work on using different points of view (who is speaking to whom and in what form). An assignment you can use for this is to come up with an arbitrary situation (e.g. a robbery in a park) and write about it in from different points of view. In this example, you could write a newspaper article describing the robbery, the protocol of the questioning of the robbed person, or how the homeless man who tried to sleep on a park bench in the vicinity witnessed the happenings.

On the other hand, if you have one specific point of view you want to improve you can turn this assignment around and write a small story each day with the same point of view but dealing with a totally new situation.

Most of what you will write in these assignments will not be great. That's not only okay, but intended. The idea behind these assignments is to make you comfortable with a certain technique, not to create great art (for now). They are the same type of exercise that playing scales for a piano player is.
Playing scales isn't great music, but they are necessary to become a better piano player.

Therefore, don't obsess about the things you don't like while working on your assignments. I think my daily posts are worse than the posts I have written before. Having only 1-2h for each post, I don't have the luxury of rethinking what I'm writing about or to challenge myself on my assumptions as much as I did before. But only a week into my experiment, I already started to notice a few things about how I can improve my writing practice to make it more efficient and fiddle less.

There are also some things about my writing I have only began to notice by writing more. For example, I find it extremely hard to find the right structure for some posts. That's why some of them end abruptly.

Just like this. Bye!