📝 5 Huge Tips for Improving Your Writing Skills
Writing is an essential skill that can help you communicate effectively and advance in your career. Whether you're writing a cover letter or a novel, there are ways to improve your writing skills. In this article, we'll discuss five huge tips for improving your writing, including ways to improve the clarity and interestingness of your writing, building a writing habit, and separating your writing process from your editing process.
📚 Read Widely
The first tip for improving your writing is to read widely. As the author Cormac McCarthy once put it, "books are made out of books." The best authors are the ones who have a wide repertoire of experiences, knowledge, and different authors they've read to pull from. If you only read one author or one genre, then your writing is going to feel kind of samey. It's like trying to cook a chicken with nothing but black pepper on your spice rack. If you want to make something truly delicious and truly interesting to eat, then you may want to have some more spices on that spice rack. Expand your reading palette and actively engage with what you read.
📝 Write Often
The second tip for improving your writing is to write often. Writing often is kind of hard to do, but it's all about building momentum. Writing is like riding a bicycle. It's all about building momentum, and that first initial challenge of getting on the bike is usually the hardest one. After that, a lot of times you can coast, put a little bit of effort in, and you keep moving forward. So how do you build that initial bit of momentum? One way you can do this is to build for yourself a writing ritual, which is basically a set of habits that make getting into the writing process a little bit easier, at least get you over that resistance.
🎶 Find Your Writing Ritual
When building your writing ritual, you can involve writing in a specific place or having a list of things that you do before you start writing. Personally, when I was writing my book, I had a specific place where I would go to write. It wasn't a very fun place to be, but it was a place where my video games weren't there, my friends weren't there, it was total solitude. I would go there and put in my 500 words per day, which I used that goal to get this book done. There was this sort of motivation, and I kind of wanted to leave, so I would get my 500 words done as quickly as possible, or at least I thought that because interestingly enough, once you build the writing momentum in the beginning of the session, you often now have those creative juices flowing, and you're in a state of flow. You will write more in many cases than you thought you would.
🚫 Separate Your Writing Process from Your Editing Process
The third tip for improving your writing is to separate your writing process from your editing process. When you edit your writing, you're actually getting into a different state of mind. You're doing a context switch, and you're now in a mind state that is less creative. You've arrested that momentum, and if you're constantly editing what you've just written, then you really never get any good momentum going in the first place. Just like mining for gold, if you never get down to 20 feet deep under the ground, you're never going to get the gold in the first place. So you have to build enough momentum to excavate a bunch of dirt, a bunch of not very useful stuff, to get to the point in a writing session where the real good gems come out. You can come back and edit them later.
🗣️ Read Your Writing Out Loud
The fourth tip for improving your writing is to read your writing out loud. We tend to think of writing as a silent art form, but it has a lot more in common with music than you might think. Reading out loud not only exposes you to the rhythm of your writing, but it also slows you down. When we read silently, we read between 200 to 400 words per minute on average. When we're scanning through our own writing trying to find little things to fix, we go even faster than that, and the faster you go, the easier it is to skip over things. But when we read out loud, most people can't read comfortably out loud at more than 150 words per minute, and at that pace, it's very easy to pick out spelling errors, grammar issues, or opportunities to simplify.
📝 Strip Every Sentence to Its Cleanest Components
The fifth and final tip for improving your writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Sometimes we're trying to sound smart, use big vocabulary, or we don't even really consider the simplicity, and it gets a little bit too complex. The simplicity doesn't necessarily mean stripping things down to as few words as possible because sometimes words add color, words add description, they make things more vivid and interesting. But a lot of times, words are there just because we want them to be there. We have a lot of trauma from our teachers telling us word limits that we had to hit for essays in high school or elementary school. And a lot of times, we're trying to use big words that make us sound a little bit intelligent, but from a reader's perspective, they would almost always rather have you use the word "use" than "utilize," words than "lexicon" because it's easier to parse, easier to understand.
🌟 Highlights
- Read widely to expand your writing palette and actively engage with what you read.
- Build a writing ritual to get over that writing resistance.
- Separate your writing process from your editing process to keep the momentum going.
- Read your writing out loud to expose yourself to the rhythm of your writing and pick out errors.
- Strip every sentence to its cleanest components to make your writing more readable.
❓ FAQ
Q: What is the best way to improve my writing skills?
A: The best way to improve your writing skills is to read widely, build a writing ritual, separate your writing process from your editing process, read your writing out loud, and strip every sentence to its cleanest components.
Q: How can I build a writing habit?
A: You can build a writing habit by building for yourself a writing ritual, which is basically a set of habits that make getting into the writing process a little bit easier, at least get you over that resistance.
Q: What is the secret of good writing?
A: The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Sometimes we're trying to sound smart, use big vocabulary, or we don't even really consider the simplicity, and it gets a little bit too complex.
Resources:
- Skillshare: https://www.skillshare.com/
- AI Chatbot: https://www.voc.ai/product/ai-chatbot
