10 Small Changes that Improve Your Writing

Are you writing for passion? Or perhaps for a blog ( like this one), website , or sales letter ?

Whatever the case, your writing needs to be compelling enough so as to grab the reader’s attention while conveying the message in clear terms. This being said the following is an overview of 10 small changes that improve your writing.

Read more

Reading more is considered a basic essential when it comes to improving your writing skills. Reading more not only broadens your imagination and stimulates your creativity, but also improves your vocabulary and use of proper grammar and syntax.

Write daily

The secret to becoming a good writer is practicing. Writing daily helps you to practice the craft while at the same time, broadening your imagination

Write in good plain English

The best writers are those who write in good plain English. As such, your work should not be full of extraneous ideas, pretentious jargon, and bloated words that might end up insulting the intelligence and worst of all, the patience of a reader.

Keep the writing and editing separate

Separating the writing and editing tasks helps you produce better quality work. Editing while writing not only interrupts the flow of ideas but also takes up plenty of time.

Start with the main idea

As a rule, you should start off with the main idea so as to give readers a strong hint of what you are saying before following up with an explanation.

Vary your sentence structure, length and type

Varying sentence length, structure, and even type help you to achieve 2 important things in writing. For starters, it enables you to emphasize a point while at the same time preventing monotony.

Concrete words

The use of concrete words is considered a mark of quality when it comes to writing. Unlike abstract words, concrete words have a particular meaning and as such are not considered as being vague. Concrete words can be described as words that can be actually felt, smelled heard, or even seen and include words such as dancing, hot, and bed. Abstract words on the other hand are vague in nature with a good example being – one of the best, good and wonderful.

Avoid being too verbose, trim everything down

Avoid being wordy or too verbose in your writing. To achieve this, you have to go through your writing eliminating any unnecessary words.

Factor in the reader's agenda

Who is the target audience? What does a reader expect? By answering these questions, you will be able to factor in a reader's agenda as part of your work.

Make it easy on the eyes

Most readers are intimidated by a huge chunk of text staring right back at them. As such, ensure you incorporate paragraphs of varying length so as to make your text more appealing

By considering the above-mentioned 10 small changes to improve your writing, you are assured of greatly improving your writing skills.