7 Ways to Improve Your Writing Skills

Some parts of writing improvement take far longer and more effort to master than others do. More difficult than correcting grammatical faults, deleting repetitions, and improving your usage of tricky analysis information organizationally analyse information, organise your thoughts, and absorb the advice of experienced writers.

We are going to share seven fast modifications with you in this article that you can make to your writing to make it more comprehensible, convincing, and readable. Some of these adjustments are technical, while others relate to writing style.

Perfect grammar, spelling, punctuation, sentence construction, and appropriate structure and formatting are all examples of writing skills (BAW, 2022). Keep in mind that I’m concentrating on writing blog-style content, such as pieces here on Medium, rather than technical reports or academic papers, as you read the following.

1. Use “That” Less Frequently

A sentence’s meaning or comprehensibility can often be preserved without the word “that” being present. Furthermore, removing one or more instances of “that” from a sentence might make it more enjoyable to read and even simpler to comprehend. Remove “that” anytime it isn’t required, unless doing so would result in an awkward-sounding or ambiguous statement.

Examples include “This is the most delectable dish I’ve ever had.”

Charles Darwin contends that the processes behind evolution are natural selection and haphazard mutation.

If we want to be successful in the long run, we must stick to this plan.

2. Keep each sentence to one idea only.

This can be a particularly useful strategy if you have trouble articulating your thoughts or arguments the or if your readers occasionally show frustration that they don’t fully grasp the points you’re attempting to make. Because you must convey your thoughts one idea at a time, you are forced to think carefully and methodically when you limit each sentence to a single notion. Practically speaking, all you need to do is separate phrases with two or more ideas into ones with just one notion.

3. Keep your tenses consistent.

There’s typically no clear need to transition between distinct tenses inside a particular sentence unless you’re specifically talking to events or processes that occur in several time periods (or, in some cases, within a given paragraph or even within an entire story). Alternating between the past, present, and future tenses, as well as each of their variations, can be confusing to your reader and make reading difficult.

Paying closer attention to how you use the tenses and making sure you don’t switch between them arbitrarily are two of the quickest ways to make your writing clearer. Use the past tense throughout the discussion if you’re writing about something that happened in the past. The same holds true for things that are happening now, will happen in the future, and things that might happen in the future.

4. Always use the same formatting style.

Because it makes for a frustrating and occasionally confusing reading experience, readers dislike being taken by surprise by the use of frequently changing formatting throughout a given piece of writing. Don’t sporadically alternate between italics, bold, and underlined text if you’re italicising select words (like this one) to stress their significance relative to the rest of the text. Use italicised text exclusively. In a similar vein, choose a certain formatting design and stick with it when formatting quotations. The list of examples is endless:

Don’t arbitrarily put periods within quotation marks in some circumstances and outside them in others.

Consistently use bullet points for your formatting. I always use a period at the end of a bullet point if it represents a complete thought; otherwise, unless it is the final bullet point in a series, leave it without any punctuation.

5. Eliminate the “Fluff” from Your Introductions

The majority of first manuscripts may be trimmed in half without losing any material or the author’s voice, according to William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well (p. 17). This is particularly true in my experience with introductions.

Until they eventually decide what they want to write about, many people ramble around in their openers, making grandiose or generalised claims, pointlessly evoking current events, reciting overused quotations, etc. After using their introductions to clarify their ideas, Dissertation Writers UK eventually start writing on the topics they actually want to cover.

6. Stop Using Fragmented Sentences

Due to the absence of an independent clause, a sentence fragment, also known as a chunk or part of a sentence (1, 2, 3). Technically speaking, a sentence fragment is one that is missing a subject, a verb, and/or functions as a subordinate clause. Due to the fact that it represents a full thought, an independent clause enables a phrase to stand alone. Fragments should always be mended by making them into entire sentences because a sentence should always communicate a complete thought.

Because they frequently muddy the meaning of your words, sentence fragments can be both confusing and annoying to your readers (Ryan, 2020).

Making ensuring that each sentence can be understood on its own, i.e., that the meaning of each sentence can be comprehended without having to refer to other sentences for clarification, is a simple technique to increase the readability of your work.

7. Discover Correct Usage of Frequently Misunderstood Words and Phrases

Every time you use a word or phrase incorrectly, you run the risk of confusing and offending your reader. Additionally, your writing exudes amateurism. You should always write exactly what you mean to express and nothing else, as I’ve said elsewhere.

What’s the point of writing something for the public to read if you can’t do everything in your power to lessen the likelihood that your readers will misunderstand what you’re saying? Making sure you truly comprehend the meanings of the words and phrases you employ is one way to achieve this. Today, certain words and phrases are abused so frequently that we are frequently surprised to discover what they actually represent. These are some words that are frequently misused:

• That vs. which
• Compose vs. comprise
• I.e., vs. e.g.,
• Affect vs. effect
• Present vs. represent
• Connote vs. denote
• Compliment vs. complement
• Imply vs. mean
• Incidents vs. incidence

Frequently overused words and phrases include:

• Begging the question
• In other words
• Whether or not
• First-come, first-serve (should be “first-come, first-served”)
• On accident (should be “by accident”)

An assignment writers must know when to use a particular word or phrase in place of another, just as a carpenter must know when to use a screw over a nail. Your writing will be more persuasive and clearer if you carefully match the words you choose to the ideas you want to share.

Conclusion

You can employ a variety of approaches and techniques in your quest to improve as a writer, some of which are considerably more demanding than others. I’ve identified seven techniques in this post for you to instantly (or very rapidly) raise the calibre of your writing.

References

Nico Ryan (2020). 7 Ways to Instantly Improve Your Writing. https://bettermarketing.pub/7-ways-to-instantly-improve-your-writing-832e2f091ff6

BAW (2022). How Academic Help Providers Save the Students’ Future?. https://bestassignmentwriter.co.uk/blog/how-academic-help-providers-save-the-students-future/