No doubt that writing takes hard work, which seems a difficult task. But there are some concrete things you can do today that will help you get on the road to improvement. Writing is very hard, and there are no shortcuts or hacks. One of the only ways is through practice, and even so, a handful of principles help speed up the process.
Different people have different ideas of what it means to be a successful writer. For some inspiring writers, success means being a published author. For others, being a successful writer simply signifies making a living writing fiction or non-fiction to get their work published in some magazine or newspaper. Many USA famous writers wrote the best selling books. So, you need to read those books and acquire the best knowledge of writing skills.
It doesn’t matter what level of writer you are; there should be a suggestion which will help:
Read on!
1: Develop a daily writing habit
We all are familiar; practice makes a man perfect, so set aside for just 10-15 minutes each day to write freely. Remember, freewriting is a healthy daily habit that allows you to get your thoughts down on paper.
You will be worry-free about outlining or proofreading your ideas when you start doing this. So, it would help if you thought of it as a journal, but you should focus on your daily entry on personal growth or a subject you want to become or be seen as an expert.
Once you are finished with your writing every day, you can start using a tool like Grammarly to stop committing mistakes and remember them for the next day.
2: Read Everyday
In addition to writing every day, develop a reading habit in yourself. Also, it is very important for increasing your vocabulary and expanding your writing repertoire. One should be selective about their reading choices, and while reading does not take you to new points of view, the content you are reading can have the biggest impact on what you get out of it.
Reading academic journals and literary fiction can help make you more complex writing projects than reading simple, curated, and pop-culture web content. So, pack a novel alongside either your lunch or pursue a magazine. Sometimes even industry blogs can be a great source of quality writing.
3: Capitalised when you are supposed to
This might seem pedantic on basic grammar rules, but it is always clear what should be capitalized and what doesn’t. Usually, there are two types of writing that you should always examine closely when uppercasing your words:
A: Proper Nouns
It is an official name of a person, city, company, product, book, country, etc. All these words refer to specific people, places, or things, and they should be capitalized in order to reflect it.
B: Title Case:
Whenever you are tiling a new story, book, article, or even a new section of an article, it is obvious you need capitalizations to distinguish it. This means all your email subject lines, blog post headlines, and even report titles should be capitalized.
4: Think about your Audience
One can be casual with their co-workers and peers, but when it comes to communicating with clients or management, it’s a good idea to write using formal grammar. It would help if you kept in mind that formal doesn’t mean old-fashioned. Rather, it asks you to use contractions, for example, it instead of it’s. You need to pick up your greeting words carefully and choose your humor wisely.
Sometimes it is much harder to convey tone in the form of words than it is in person-the types of formality described above can compensate for this and make you ensure that your Audience doesn’t feel disrespected. There are many popular conservative authors, and one can read the books and then get acknowledged with their best writing skills.
5: Avoid filler phrases
Wordy phrases like due to the fact should get swapped out for their simpler and more exact synonyms. However, some buzzwords might be trendy but don’t necessarily mean they effectively communicate ideas. You should remove them from your business communication unless you get sure that everyone understands exactly what buzzwords mean.
6: Use Writing Templates
With the help of templates, it can save you serious time and effort. If you have to send out similar letters or memos regularly, you need to create a template with the help of customizable fields. You can always personalize your communication with a sentence or two. There are different content creation templates for ebooks, press releases, slide shares, infographics and a lot more to help you get started.
7: Ask for feedback
This is one of the most important tips for all who want to become a better writer. So, if you read your writing several times, it becomes a wall of words for you. It would help if you played in your head with no real meaning. The best way to find out how your writing will hit the ears of your readers is to have someone else read your written content.
So, getting your peers and colleagues ready to provide you with feedback on your writing gives you a window into how other people will read it. Different people carry different experiences and ways of interpreting things and perceiving your ideas. Sometimes, you think you write a crystal clear paragraph that others might find confusing. So, the more often you take this criticism, the more capable you will be of reinforcing your voice and identity with your Audience.
8: Read your writing aloud
So, before you send anything important, you need to quickly read through it out loud. This may seem a little strange, but reading your writing aloud is the most effective way to catch typos, grammar errors, and bad phrasing.
9: Write down your ideas
Try to keep a little notebook with yourself and start writing down your ideas for stories, articles, novels, and characters. It would help if you wrote down snippets of conversation that you hear. Else, you can write down plot twists and visual details and fragments of either song lyrics, poems that move you further. Having these ideas written down helps inspire you or go directly into your writing.
10: Read Constantly
If you are not writing your book or a short story, you should be reading the work of other great writers. It will help if you read all types of writing, from novels to books to short-story collections. One can read from their favorite writers, best-selling authors, and writers whose work you are unfamiliar with. So, if you want to be a good writer, you need to consume good writing.
11: Use powerful sentence
One should have the aim to write shorter sentences with strong verbs. It’s true that not every sentence should be the same, and thus you need variation. You need to create sentences with oomph, and then you will find it easier to do in the revision stage.
12: Start and end Strong
One of the most important parts of your writing is the beginning and end. Especially in the beginning, if you don’t hook your reader, they won’t read the rest of your writing. So, spend some extra time and craft a good beginning whenever you write your first draft. Make the customers interested and want them to know more. Once you are done with this, write a good ending, leaving them wanting more of your writing.
