Professional Development
Three simple ways to instantly improve your writing
Writing is an important skill for every business person at every level. These three simple tips will help you get your point across to your audience:
1. Change it up.
Have you ever read a paragraph where every sentence started with the same word? It’s boring and repetitive, and it happens all the time. If you’re serious about avoiding this, print out your work and underline the first word of each paragraph. You’ll quickly see how much variety you’re using at the beginning of your sentences.
Don’t forget variety in sentence length and style. Try short sentences, questions, clauses, and fragments. Change it up, but don’t forget to be clear and concise.
2. Cut the crap.
Big words and useless phrases just clutter up your writing. Get rid of them. If it doesn’t add value, cut it out.
3. Break it up.
Online or off, nobody wants read huge blocks of text. Headings, bullets, and short paragraphs will break up even the most complicated of subjects into readable chunks. Don’t be afraid to try these techniques in all of your writing, including emails. Your audience will thank you.
Discussion
4 comments for “Three simple ways to instantly improve your writing”
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My first drafts often feature lots of sentences that begin with the same word (or stretches where every first word begins with the same letter).
Something that I’ve found really helpful, and more practical than it sounds at first, is an old writing exercise from What If. You start each sentence with a word that begins with the next letter in the alphabet (so, sentence #1 starts with a word that begins with A, etc). It sounds silly, but it really does stretch your style and vocab, even if you wind up scraping the x or the q words. What’s always intriguing to me is that people usually don’t pick up on it unless you specifically point it out, but if it gives your writing an artificial feel, you can always make the sentences more natural on the second draft.
After my first internship, I found that the best way to improve my writing was to print out the articles I wrote and mark them up with a red pen. You have to be aggressive and pretend it’s not your writing. There are always mistakes you miss on the screen of your computer.
@Jessica Cool exercise! I’ve never done that one. It’s hard to recognize problems in our own writing. I know that it’s not a strong suit of mine. So, taking some time between writing and sending out can really allow you to look at your writing in a new light.
@Rachel Printing out work is huge with me, too. I sometimes cringe when I read what I wrote a while back (sometimes even things I wrote recently). But, you’re right. It’s an important exercise for improvement.
In my opinion these techniques are so help full to write an email.
we should adopt it all.
Regards