No matter what your vocation, use these simple tips to improve your writing.
- Lead with your main idea – Let people know your subject upfront. If you don’t, they’ll stop reading.
- Good writing is concise. It can certainly be creative, but it should be free of superfluous adjectives and unnecessary details. More is not always better. Sometimes it’s just more and often it’s less.
- Avoid using “that” as often as possible. Even though it is sometimes useful when adding some type of description, the sentence can most often become more powerful by moving the description to before the noun.
- Condense what you’ve written, then do it again. This will help your writing be tighter and more interesting.
- Use a thesaurus to help you find the perfect word. Mark Twain once said, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”
- Overused clichés are as common as dirt. Good writers avoid them like the plague.
- Read more and your writing will naturally improve.
- Use Spell Check and Grammar Check. It’s free and instantly available. Duh.
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