Improving your writing can feel like a lot of extra work. Indeed, there are people who spend years of study, or even their entire professional careers, trying to master the various frameworks and formats that make up written language and text-based communication. Even so, boosting your own writing skills will be a necessary item for your to-do list, whether you’re competing in the world of online marketing, looking to market yourself with a strong resume, or trying to tell your unique story in a way that connects with more people.
For busy folks, one secret to improved writing skills is to be very conscious about never letting perfection become the enemy of progress. In other words, you don’t need to become the next Cormac McCarthy in order to write a highly effective blog post, press release, or e-mail. The path to success here does not require taking out a student loan for a master’s degree in creative writing. Instead, it lies in small, intentional steps that anyone can wrap their heads around, even if you’re coming into the game with only the most basic or very rusty writing skills.
1. Use Widely Available Resources to Master Grammar
Grammar can seem like an arcane and senseless set of rules if you don’t have any formal experience studying writing, but in reality, these rules all exist for specific reasons. Whether you find it tedious or fascinating, good grammar is the bedrock of effective writing. Luckily, today’s writers don’t need to memorize hundreds of rules about comma placement and capitalization; we can simply find the answers to grammar questions as we go, thanks to a wealth of online writing resources.
Many people who write for a living will keep a style guide at their work desk right next to other key resources like a thesaurus. For those who prefer to de-clutter, online resources are also ample and effective. Big-name online resources like Grammarly and the Merriam-Webster website are a great place to start, but your word processing software probably also has built-in tools that will flag potential grammar mistakes for your review, as well as offer suggestions for correcting them.
To begin with, just make sure you nail the basics: capitalization, sentence structure, and the proper use of commas and periods. You should never feel that you’re struggling against the rules of grammar when trying to craft your message. Instead, you should be using your knowledge of grammatical rules to your advantage. As you become more confident in your usage of grammar, you can expand your toolkit and start incorporating advanced punctuation like em-dashes and semicolons to help add nuance and precision to any message.
2. Good Writers Are Good Readers
If this suggestion throws up an immediate red flag because you haven’t read a book in a while, don’t sweat it. Blogs, journals, online articles, even advertisements, and social media posts, all reading counts, and all of it can teach you something as a writer.
I was a public librarian for many years, and any of my colleagues from that world will tell you that even audiobooks and graphic novels count as “real” reading. For the purposes of improving our own writing, however, we will mostly want to focus on text-based work where we can see the grammatical choices and stylistic elements laid out before us and then analyze the work on the page at our own pace.
By exposing yourself to a diversity of voices, styles, and formats, you will gain a better sense of language and storytelling. Even bad writing can teach you good writing. In fact, one of the most interesting and illuminating ways to engage with someone else’s unsuccessful writing is to break it down sentence by sentence and figure out why it doesn’t work, thus equipping yourself to avoid those same mistakes in your own craft.
Becoming a reader doesn’t have to involve a massive lifestyle overhaul. Try to get yourself into the habit of reading for at least 10 to 15 minutes every day by scheduling a specific reading time, such as at the tail end of your daily lunch break or before you go to sleep at night.
3. Assertive Outlining and Editing is Key
Working writers will tell you that simply sitting down and getting words onto the page is often the hardest part of the job. While I can attest to the truth of this, it’s also a mindset that risks minimizing the critical importance of the pre-writing and post-writing processes.
Unless you’re just doing a random free-writing exercise to get your creative juices flowing, you should never start typing without some sort of plan in place. For most people, this involves creating an outline. Some people make the mistake of thinking that outlining will only make the process of writing take even longer, but the reality is that you can often write your way through a complex topic much, much faster when equipped with a detailed outline of all the points you want to hit, and the order they make the most sense in.
Everyone’s outlining process is different, but it usually involves creating a bulleted list, or more complex hierarchical structure, that identifies and organizes all of the key ideas you want to write about. If any good phrases, quotes, or whole sentences come into your head during the outlining process, put them in. You can always edit your outline later if it becomes too ambitious or tangential. In fact, there’s a modern school of thought that says a good piece of writing should be designed to express one single idea as effectively as possible. Identify that core idea first, then build an outline that supports what you have to say about it.
Large language models like ChatGPT can help you create an initial outline incredibly quickly, but it’s very important to review any AI-assisted writing for hallucinations, unnatural stylistic choices, and various other errors. Remember: bad writing can hurt your project just as much as good writing can help it. Do you really want to leave that in the hands of a robot playing a souped-up game of Mad Libs?
Just like the work doesn’t begin with typing your opening sentence, it also doesn’t end when you wrap up your conclusion paragraph or call-to-action. After your first draft is finished, you need to proofread and edit, sometimes ruthlessly. Start by taking a break to disengage your mind from what you just wrote. Leave it overnight if possible, but at the very least, you should step away for a coffee break before scrolling back up to dive back into what you just wrote.
Not sure where to start with editing? It requires a different set of skills than writing and can indeed be a difficult art to master, but the basic idea is actually quite straightforward: take what you wrote and make it better. Typically, you want to use the editing process to make your writing as concise, engaging, and accessible as possible. Remove sentences or entire sections that don’t serve to move your message forward, and find opportunities to simplify things in a way that doesn’t detract from your voice.
Still Stuck: Better Content Matters Can Help
The craft of writing has been evolving for centuries, so three quick things to remember is obviously just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to great writing advice.
So, what’s the single best, quickest, and most cost-effective way to improve your written content? For many people, it’s admitting that you could use some help from a pro! If you’ve reached that point, Better Content Matters can help. BCM offers a talented roster of multi-disciplinary writers, editors, and web professionals armed with cutting-edge online marketing insights, and we would be happy to put this well-honed toolkit to work for you. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help.
Further Reading Suggestions
https://bettercontentmatters.com/three-ways-to-make-each-word-of-your-content-writing-count/
https://bettercontentmatters.com/simple-tips-to-improve-your-seo/
