What Good Writing Demands of the Writer

by Similoluwa Ifedayo

In two years as a Commonwealth Correspondent, I have written 20 articles. Eleven were named Editor’s Picks. Six times I earned Correspondent of the Month. But these numbers are not the story. They are the evidence of a different lesson: how to recognise good writing before anyone else does, how to feel it in the spine of a paragraph, the tension of a sentence, the discomfort of a truth. That’s what good writing demands of a writer and it’s how I learned to recognise good work before anyone else validated it.

I can now tell, before submission, when an article will be an Editor’s Pick. I know when a piece will stay with people long enough to be read closely, argued with, and sometimes rewarded.

When I became a Correspondent, my goal was simple and sincere: to write about social issues affecting Nigeria and the world. I did what serious writers are taught to do. I wrote clean, formal pieces. I cited responsibly. I organised my arguments neatly. I sounded like someone who had done the reading and I had.

Some of those articles were rewarded, and they deserved it. But some were also the kind of writing you forget a day later. Not because they were bad, but because they were too safe. They explained problems without disturbing the reader’s relationship to those problems. They informed without interfering.

At some point, I realised I was bored while writing about things that should make a person restless. That boredom was my breakthrough. I was tired of documenting reality instead of interrogating it. Tired of writing summaries of conversations I was too polite to have on the page. Tired of producing articles that could sit comfortably in a newspaper without asking anything of the reader.

So I changed the standard. I stopped asking, Is this correct? I started asking, Would this bother me if someone else wrote it? Would I keep reading if my name wasn’t on it?

Those questions ruined my comfort and saved my writing.

I also began to notice something else: the sentences I avoided were usually the ones that mattered most. If I kept circling an idea, softening it, qualifying it into safety, it was often because the sentence frightened me. So I learned to write toward it. Not dramatically. Precisely. The sentence that makes me think if someone quotes it back to me is usually the spine of the piece.

When I wrote “5 Reasons to Be Rebellious as a Nigerian,” I knew halfway through that it would be an Editor’s Pick. Not because it was loud, but because it unsettled me. Rebellion, in that piece, wasn’t chaos; it was a responsibility. I wasn’t attacking the government first; I was attacking obedience. That reframing made me pause. I’ve learned to trust that pause.

That became my first rule: if an article doesn’t impress me intellectually, I don’t submit it. Not impress as in clever, but as in honest enough to hold weight. I’m ruthless about uniqueness—not novelty for its own sake, but difference rooted in thought. I always ask: What am I saying here that isn’t already circulating? If the answer is “nothing,” I keep working.

Structure started to matter more than style. I realised strong articles don’t argue with adjectives; they argue with sequence. An opening tilts the floor. A middle complicates what the reader thought they understood. An ending doesn’t just summarise, it closes the door gently and leaves the room changed. When something feels flat, I rarely add words. I move paragraphs. Rearrangement is thinking.

When I wrote about youth participation in democracy, I didn’t begin with frameworks or statistics. I began with the insult hidden in praise—the way young people are constantly called “the future” so they can be excluded from the present. That opening wasn’t strategic, it was honest. I was annoyed we didn’t name that contradiction enough.

When I wrote about leadership and gender inequality, I resisted the urge to sound balanced. Balance, I’ve learned, can be a hiding place. I started with small hypocrisies—how women are celebrated symbolically and constrained structurally. The data came later. Feeling came first. Not because facts don’t matter, but because readers need to care before they can be convinced.

In “50,005 Reasons Why Silence Is Killing Women: Let’s Break the Damn Silence!” I wanted numbers to lead, but not in the dead way numbers are usually deployed. I remembered a public speaking class I attended in 2022 and how statistics can either numb or disturb. So instead of saying one woman dies every ten minutes, I wrote:

“By the time you finish reading this, one woman will be close to her death. In an hour, six women will be gone. By the end of today, approximately 137 women will lose their lives. By the end of the year, 50,005 women will be dead—all because of violence.“

The information didn’t change; the experience did. I learned that implication is often more powerful than explanation and that a title isn’t a label, it’s a promise. My articles titles are carefully and intentionally written.

This is how I predict a Commonwealth Correspondent Article Editor’s Pick now, before submission: If the article argues with me while I’m writing it, I’m close. If I reread a paragraph too many times—not for grammar, but for truth—I’m closer. If I can summarise the entire piece in one sentence that makes me uncomfortable, I’m done.

When I write about women, one of my favourite themes, I’m deeply connected. In “Womanhood Is Beautiful. And Tiring. And Expensive. And Everything at Once,” I began with a conversation with my mother and widened the lens outward. I told personal truths without making myself the centre. I was vulnerable without surrendering privacy. That balance didn’t arrive overnight. It came from years of reflection, writing narrative essays and from paying attention to everyday conversations, the kind that linger after they end.

Editors don’t just create this kind of writing; they recognise it. I was fortunate to work within Commonwealth Correspondents, and especially with the Editor, Clare Keizer, who refused to let me be lazy. She didn’t just correct sentences; she questioned instincts. Paragraph by paragraph, her kind comments forced me to decide whether I believed what I was saying or whether it merely sounded good. That kind of editing sharpens thought, not just prose.

There were also internal debates; correspondents from other countries poking holes in assumptions I didn’t realise were local. Those conversations trained me to write with global awareness without sanding down Nigerian truth. They taught me how to argue properly, not loudly.

Friends and family played their part too. Explaining an article casually and meeting confusion showed me where clarity was missing. Watching someone lean forward during a conversation showed me where energy should live on the page.

Over the years, I’ve learned to use distance as a tool. I send drafts to people whose judgment I trust—not for praise, but for resistance. On tight deadlines, I sometimes ask ChatGPT to grade my work. Not to write for me, but to interrogate the thinking: where the argument thins, where repetition creeps in, where clarity slips under pressure. Used properly, AI tools don’t replace instinct; they audit it. The responsibility remains mine, the discomfort stays human.

Over time, my most rewarded articles weren’t the most polished, they were the most present. They took responsibility for perspective. They trusted implication more than instruction. They refused neutrality as performance.

And I’m still learning. Writing, I’ve realised, is not something you master—it’s something you return to. A lifelong practice of noticing where your thinking has grown lazy and refusing to let it stay there. Every good piece teaches me how much better the next one could be.

I’m also careful not to turn method into dogma. Every kind of writing demands its own posture. A reported piece, a newsletter, a press release, a research essay, a reflective column—they each ask for different tools, different restraints, different risks. I don’t expect this approach to apply everywhere, and I don’t force it to.

But for my Commonwealth Correspondents articles where thought, argument, and voice must coexist, this way of working has sharpened everything. It has helped me recognise when an idea is finished and when it is merely presentable. It has taught me how to trust discomfort as a signal, not failure. And it has given me a private standard that doesn’t depend on applause to feel complete.

So if someone asks how to write better, this is the answer I trust: Don’t just aim to inform; aim to rearrange understanding. Don’t just chase originality; chase precision. Don’t submit hoping an editor will be impressed, impress yourself first.

Anybody can write a good article. Not everybody is willing to sit long enough with uncertainty to write a necessary one. That willingness—to stay, to think deeply and uniquely, to ask questions, to doubt, to revise, to insist—is the demand of good writing. The rest is recognition.

And when it comes, it rarely feels surprising. Most importantly, fall in love with your write-ups first.