10 Classic Tips To Enhance Your Writing Skills & Write Better

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Writing is a skill that requires practice to develop. You can develop this skill by writing daily. If you are a blogger then you should write well, so you can convey your message well.

Your readers are your best critics. They can tell you better about what you are delivering to them.

There are lots of things you should do to impress your visitors. The most important thing you need to care about is grammatical mistakes. Try to tell things in a clear and comprehensive way.

Here I am discussing a few points which would help you improve your writing skills.

1. Proofread your writing

Reread your article at least two times. You can sort out some stupid mistakes in the first look. The second read ensures the removal of any gigantic mistake. If possible, read it aloud.

You can easily remove A lot of mistakes from your post by proof reading. When you read it the second time you will read it from a reader’s perspective and this will help you a lot in sentence construction.

• Learn How to better proof-read your articles

2. Draft your post and edit it later

Don’t hit the publish button as soon as you finish writing. Make it rest inside your draft and edit it later with a fresh mind. This habit is helpful in finding general mistakes. This will also help you write articles quickly.

As Ernest Hemingway puts it about editing:

“Write drunk, edit sober”

“The first draft of anything is shit.”

You can see the impetus given to editing what you’ve written. I consider editing more important than the writing itself.

While good writing allows you to put your thoughts precisely on paper, editing decides what needs to be still on paper, and what not.

Be ruthless with editing and kill off the words and sentences that don’t fit into the big picture of what you’re aiming for.

3. Ask your friend to proofread your post

If you are working in a team, then ask other writer of your team to edit your post. It will ensure an error-free post. If you are working alone, then you can ask your friends or family members (who have excellent knowledge of grammar) to proofread your post. You can also hire an editor to edit your posts and this will help a lot in the long run.

4. Don’t repeat the same word again

It can diminish the attractiveness of your article. Try to use different words. If it is necessary to repeat any word, then try to find out its synonym and use it in your article. You can use WordWeb tool for this purpose.

 Here are online tools to better proof-read your article 

5. Learn grammar

Grammar decides the quality of post. If you are making too much grammar mistakes in your articles, then no one wants to read it. You would also get lots of unpleasant comments for our mistakes. So learn grammar to avoid any typos. You can learn grammar from your old high school grammar book.  I feel my Grammar is not that good and I often mistake. Even I spend lots of time learning grammar every day.

Read : 6 Best Grammar Checker Tools

Here are some most recommended resources for brushing up your basic grammar understanding:

• “The Elements of Style” by Strunk and White
• TalkEnglish’s Basics of English Grammar
• GrammarBook English Rules

6. Don’t change tenses in between sentences

Many writers make this mistake by changing tenses in between the post. They write in simple present tense and immediately switch to past tense or future tense. It is sometimes grammatically correct, but it suffices to confuse readers.  Avoid changing tense and give a clear picture by writing in simple language.

7. Remove unnecessary words if any

Proofread helps in deciding what to include and what to exclude. If you found any word which adds no value to the post, then it is to be better to exclude that word from the post. Remember that “I am a smart boy” is better than “I am a cool, elegant guy”.

8. Write to the point and simple

Remember the fact that you are not writing a novel. You are writing for the web so you need to be simple and illustrative so that anyone could understand your voice. Don’t use advance words which make reader to use dictionary to understand the meaning of words. Keep it as simple as possible.

9. The mirror writing style of great writers

If you want to write best, then you should read the best. There are several blogs out there that provide quality content to the readers. Try to read Copyblogger of Brian Clark because it delivers the best content in the simplest way. There are blogs like Dailywritingtips and Writer’s help which give the best writing tips you need.

4 Ways to Hone Your Writing Skills

1. Spend time to write everyday

If you want to become a great blog writer – you must write every day no matter what. Writing daily can definitely improve your writing skills. The 100^th post you write can definitely a better one when it compared with the 1^st post, agree?

So focus on writing every day. That’s the ONLY way you can improve your writing skills much faster.

So, how to get started with writing every day?

Know your best times:

When you work more productively?
Is it early in the mornings or late at mid nights when no one is watching over your shoulder??

If you know your best times in a day, you’ll better deliver whatever you’re doing.

As I said earlier in this post, if you want to become a better blogger – you’ll definitely need to improve your writing skills.

So always spend your best times on writing something.

Know your best spot:

Do you write better when you’re at home or café?

I myself find writing better blog posts when I’m in café or when I’m travelling.

Because working from home doesn’t always give motivation to me. So I always change the spots, sometimes café, co-working office, etc. So know your best spots first, then start writing.

2. Give yourself writing deadline

Don’t stare at the blank screen on your laptop. You’ll end up writing nothing! Write whatever comes to your mind, be it a poetry, blog post, about your crush, recently watched movie – it can be anything and everything. Your goal is just to write. And you can get this done better when you give yourself a deadline for each task.

Here’s how this process goes..

Give yourself 25 minutes to write doing nothing. Just write.

Avoid distractions while writing.

This is SO important to write faster blog posts.

You need to use distraction-free writing tools to focus ONLY on writing part.

Here are few tools for you to use;

• Zenwriter
• Ommwriter

What do these distractions-free writing tools do?

They work like charm and gives you more freedom to write with no distractions. Research says that while playing background music, one can write effective blog posts. Because there will be no distractions will reach you from outside.

• Read: 11 Effective tips to boost Article Writing skills

3. Don’t edit while writing

This is a pro tip, ask any prolific writer what’s his secret to write faster blog posts – it’ll be writing without editing.

No, I’m not saying you to don’t edit at all.

But don’t edit while you’re writing. Writing and editing are two distinct phases which must be done one after the other. Remember you can’t write better blog posts when you often edit while writing.

Okay, it’s always a better idea to edit ruthlessly the unwanted things, but give yourself time to writing part first. Editing comes later.

How to edit like a pro (after finishing the writing part) then?

Make it easy to skim: Most online readers don’t read word to word, do you? They simply prefer skimming the topics, because they’re by default lazy. There’s nothing wrong in that though but you must edit your blog posts in a such a way as it becomes easy to understand the meat of your content easily.

• Use bullet points
• Write list posts
• Embed appealing images
• Use brief paragraphs
• Include relevant links
• Use sub heads etc

This is how you can sharpen your writing skills. This way you can write better blog posts almost every time.

4. Read the best writing

Why?

To analyze the pattern of best writers:

This way you’ll know what to write and what NOT to write. Most prolific writers spend thousands of hours on improving their writing skills, that’s how they become skilled writers. When you’re reading the blogs like Copyblogger, Write to done etc–you’ll learn something from each blog post. Read word to word, don’t skim through them if you want to make most out of your reading time.

To understand how great posts are created:

Great posts are not only those which include great meat, also those which are crafted in a perfect way. You’ll learn how to craft like a pro, when you’re reading good writing.

To hone your Blog writing skills:

This is a no brainer, when you’re reading the best stuff online – you’ll know how to improve your writing skills. You’ll also know what to read and what not to read when you’ve gone through the best posts either in your niche or out of your niche.

Bonus tip – End with a CTA (Call To Action):

This is a must, but most bloggers don’t end their blog posts with a CTA. Without calling your readers to take some action, they do nothing after reading it. End your blog posts either by motivating them to subscribe, leaving a blog comment or sharing with their networks.

These are some basic tips for writing well online. No one is perfect, but you can improve your writing style by following these friendly advices.

Do you know something more to improve your writing skill?

Start a discussion in the comment section.

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