10 Ways to Improve Your Writing Skills Today

Whether you’re simply composing an e-mail or writing the next great American novel, your writing skills are a reflection of your thoughts and ideas. Poor writing skills can result in confusion among your readers and can reflect poorly on you personally. The following are 10 ways to improve your writing skills:

1. Write more often. If you want to be a better writer, you’ll have to write more often. There’s no way around it. As with any skill, the more you practice, the better you will get. There are innumerable online writing groups if you need inspiration.

2. Get back to basics. Excellent writers know the basics. Think back to high school composition rules and techniques. For instance, begin with an outline to help you formalize your ideas and give your writing structure.

3. Double-check your writing for common mistakes. There are a handful of common writing mistakes that are seen over and over again with new writers. Double-check your verb tenses and ensure that they stay consistent through your writing; make sure your nouns and verbs agree; and never start a sentence with a conjunction or end it with a preposition.

4. Conduct great research. Having well-researched writing can make all the difference in the world when it comes to improving the quality of your writing. A simple misstatement of facts, even in fictional writing, can turn a reader off immediately.

5. Read more often. By exposing yourself to different writers and writing styles, you can passively improve your writing skills. If you generally write within a particular genre, read as much as you can within that genre. Don’t entirely avoid other genres, however, as reading from a broad range of genres will ensure you further improve your writing skills.

6. Read your writing out loud. Reading your writing out loud will not only help you pinpoint typographical errors, but it will also help you quickly identify awkwardly worded sentences. As you read your work, highlight the areas that you’d like to revisit.

7. Ask for help. Even the best writers need the help of editors to edit and proofread their work. Ask a talented friend, colleague or family member to look over your writing and edit for style, tone and grammar.

8. Mix up your sentence length. Unless you are writing for a scientific journal (where writing three and four-line sentences is a common practice), make sure you have both long and short sentences within your paragraphs. If a sentence feels too long, it probably is. Break it up into multiple sentences.

9. Avoid overusing pronouns. This is especially important when you have multiple subjects to which a specific pronoun could refer. Be sure your readers know exactly who you are talking about when you say “he” or “she.”

10. Don’t underestimate the power of a spell-checker. Even if your software of choice automatically inserts the squiggly red line under misspelled words, when you’re done with your piece, run your spell-checker just to be sure. If your ideas flow fast and furious when you write, you may miss instances of this red squiggly line.

Randall Davidson is a co-founder of ProofreadingServices.Us, an online proofreading service based in San Francisco, California.  ProofreadingServices.Us is particularly well-known for its dissertation proofreading services.