Three Ways to Improve Your Writing
No matter whether you write for your job, your business, or fun, you must be interested in improving your writing, or you would not be here at a website with the slogan “Better Communication for Smart People”.
And this made me wonder: What are three recommendations that I would make to anyone who wants to improve his or her writing skills?
The answer? 1. Look it up! 2. Read! 3. Write!
1. Look it up!
You have to be willing to “look it up”, if you want to improve your writing. No writer knows everything. And we all forget various lessons and must re-learn them as we need them. My three favorite look-it-up websites for writers are Dictionary.com, Google, and Wikipedia.
I go to Dictionary.com to look up word definitions and to check for proper hyphenation of words.
I go to Google to compare frequencies of competing phrases and expressions and to look beyond Dictionary.com for definitions. For example, if you search for “define: aardvark” without the quotation marks at Google, then Google will return the definition of the word “aardvark” from several sources.
Searches without the “define:” prefix at Google often return matches at Wikipedia, which explains how I came to appreciate Wikipedia as a rich source of information about words and the English language.
2. Read!
Better writers are more voracious readers. You have to read more than the average person to become better at writing.
Why? Because reading exposes you to various styles of writing as well as gives you a more comprehensive picture of the world.
What/where/how should you read? The answer depends on your lifestyle and your mood. My three suggestions are blogs, books, and news websites.
I recommend that you read blogs because you can read in snatches of time while developing a sense of an author’s voice over days, weeks, and months. You can read blogs about better communication, such as mine or Grammar Girl’s. And you can read blogs about your favorite topics, which can be found by searching Google for the name of the topic plus the word “blog”.
I recommend that you read books because books teach you more about deep organization of information or entertainment than a blog post or series of blog posts ever could. And you do not necessarily have to buy physical books. If you are in the U.S., you can get an Amazon Kindle and then buy and download books wirelessly in less than a minute. You can read famous books at no charge through the Project Gutenberg website. And you can find free and paid ebooks on current topics from websites such as Free-eBooks.net and eBook Palace.
I recommend that you search for news of interest to you at Google News or similar sites and then read about a news topic in several of the returned matches. Beyond being able to learn about a news topic from several angles, you also get to learn how to cover a topic with several different writing styles. And doing this the old-fashioned way — by subscribing to thousands of different newspapers and news magazines from around the world — to get the same scope of coverage would cost you a small fortune, whereas the Google News-type approach is essentially free.
3. Write!
Perhaps one day someone will invent an “Inner Writing” technique along the lines of the famous book The Inner Game of Tennis
Until — and probably even after — someone invents such a technique, you have to write to improve your writing. And I recommend that you “do it” by writing more email messages, by writing blog posts, and by writing articles.
When I recommend writing more email messages, I am not talking about cryptic, text-message-style email. I am talking about writing email messages that are organized, checked for misspellings, and so on. Each email message that you send represents an opportunity for you to test whether you communicated well with your recipient. If the message leads to your desired result with little or no additional explanation, then you communicated well. If the message leads to confusion or chaos, then you communicated poorly.
I recommend writing blog posts because I appreciate how writing posts for my blog has helped me to write better. Writing a series of posts requires you to present your thoughts such that they can be consumed by your readers as bite-size chunks. And writing a series of posts forces you, if you want the series to have some semblance of cohesiveness, to use one of just a few frameworks for each post. This lets you concentrate more on what you want to say than how you want to say it when you sit down to write. But it also has the osmotic effect of teaching you to brainstorm a topic more quickly when you are away from your computer.
I recommend writing articles because their length lets you go into much more depth than an email message or blog post ever could. That extra length can be intimidating at first, but it also forces you to learn how to organize a topic in a more complex way. And going into extra depth about a topic can be liberating.
