How to Improve Your Writing in a Few Easy Steps ...

When you first hop into a car, you may be fantastic at doing doughnuts in the Kmart car park, but before they are going to let you on the roads, you are going to have to learn how to obey the rules and drive like everybody else. The same is true when you improve your writing, but where you go from there is up to you. If you become a regular driver for the rest of your life then so be it, but you can become a fantastic and high quality driver. The same again is true for writing. Just because your writing has improved and conforms to the rest of the country, does not mean you cannot build upon it to become the world’s greatest wordsmith.

The rules of English/American/Canadian/Australian grammar are quite strict, but don’t be afraid to break them, you just cannot break them as a rule. Littering your work with grammatical inaccuracy is less about abiding by the rules, and more about making sure the reader can understand what you are getting at.

Construct the written story from the voice recording, because the way you speak and tell a story will be more natural. The natural storytelling manner will come across in your written text. When you write you have to think then write, and whilst writing your thought process has to stop. If you create a narrative and then speak it, you will find that your thought process is un-interrupted and you speak a far better narrative than you would have otherwise written. All you then need to do is get it down on paper, which involves listening to yourself and writing down what you hear (leaving out the “ums” and “errs”).

You need to know the difference between “there” and “their”, or “has” and “have”. There are always going to be words that you spell incorrectly, and thanks to spellcheckers, they should not cause you any problems. But some words will not be picked up as mistakes by spellcheckers, so you need to educate yourself on them before you continue.

You need to mix impact with understanding. Words can hold a lot of power if they are placed correctly in a sentence. Sometimes the big hitter phrase is at the beginning of a sentence, and sometimes it is at the end (like the punch line of a joke). You need to learn how to keep the impact but maintain the readers understanding. Learning sentence structure, known as “Sentence Syntax”, is essential if you want to succeed as a writer.

Get ready to cringe, because you are going to read parts that you cannot believe you wrote. Other parts will knock your socks off. As you read the text whilst it is still fresh in your mind, the good and bad parts become gray (lack distinction). Read it a few days later and purge the text of the stinky bits, and do not touch the good bits.