How to improve your writing?

Do you want to take your writing skills to the next level?
These are 9 practical tips to improve your writing skills. Let’s get started.

1. Build your foundation.

Let’s start by learning some basics of good writing first.

When we read something, if we notice a lower case ‘i’, that piece of writing instantly loses credibility and it creates a bad impression. So, if you want to improve your writing, you need to first learn the punctuation and some basic rules of good writing.

These are 5 simple rules you need to follow when writing something.

Rule 1: ‘i’ must always be in upper case.

Rule 2: A sentence must always start with upper case.

Rule 3: A question sentence must end with a question mark.

Rule 4: Three or more things must be separated using commas.

Note: There must a comma before “and” too. Most people miss this.

Rule 5: Proper nouns must always be in upper case.
Now, if we start thinking about what’s a proper noun, there is a huge and confusing list of categories of proper nouns. If we start learning and remembering all those categories, we will lose sight of what we are trying to learn here, which is “How to improve your writing?’

For that reason, let’s not discuss the huge list of proper nouns. Just remember these 3 things which always need to be in upper case.

2. Focus on Spellings too.

Yes, Spellings. Another important part of good writing is to not make any spelling mistakes. In academic writing or a test, if there is a spelling mistake in your writing, you instantly lose marks.

In a test, if you are not sure about the spelling of a word, do the smart thing, and avoid it altogether.

When you are writing on an online platform like a word document or an email, just use built-in features to spell-check your writing. You can also use writing assistant tools like Grammarly.

If your writing is hand-written and you are not sure about some spellings, check the correct spelling on google before finalizing your writing. It may only take a few minutes, but it is necessary. If you are preparing for a test where you cannot google the correct spelling, here are some tips to remember spellings easily:

Recognize that you have a problem with a particular word. Accept it by saying to yourself, “Ok, I have a problem with the word BELIEVE, I don’t remember if it has IE or EI.

Write down such problematic words 3 to 4 times in a notebook with a calm mind. By doing this, you are engaging your senses. Your eyes are now looking at the correct spelling. Your fingers are writing the correct spelling, and you have a great chance of remembering the right spelling.

Group the words together. For example, if you have a problem remembering if a word has C or CC, write down all the words with C on one side and all the words with CC on the other side. Group them together will help you remember them better.

3. Keep a journal.

Every day before going to bed, write just 3 lines about your day. As you get comfortable with it, write a few more lines. If you miss a day, no problem, don’t worry about it, write it the next day. You may not realize the power and benefits that come with writing a diary, it will change your life, literally.

Of course, the number #1 benefit is, it will improve your writing. When you make a habit of writing every day, your mind will naturally search for new words, new phrases, and new ways to form a sentence and express yourself.

A personal diary will give you a golden opportunity to review your entire day and
identify the things that you could have done differently. It relieves your
stress because when you write about a stressful situation, your diary acts like
an outlet. It will boost your memory because you are trying to recollect what
happened in the last 12 hours. These are just a few benefits to name, there are a lot more.

Writing a diary will take 5 mins, which is just 0.03% of your day. But the benefits are endless.

So don’t think much, just start today.

4. Send me a sample essay.

Yes, if you want someone to look at your essay and give you someone constructive feedback, I will do that for you, for free.

Write an essay, and send it to me using the contact me form, or you can send it to me via Instagram direct message too.

I will review your essay, point out your mistakes (if there are any) and tell you where you need to improve.

5. Use good vocabulary in your writing.

Many people think learning vocabulary means learning as many words as possible. It is actually not.

First, You have to learn words that are still in use. Yes, there are some words, phrases and idioms that people don’t use anymore and your writing will look bad if you use them.

Second, even if you worked really hard to learn a tough word if you use it in the wrong context, the entire purpose will be defeated.

For example, you learned that “Amputation means cutting off a limb”

If you write, “My uncle met with an accident. A car ran over him and amputated his leg”.

You used a great word but amputation means cutting off a limb surgically, the correct word to use here is severed.
Read my article on How to learn Vocabulary easily?

Our goal is to use good vocabulary in your writing. A good place to start is by replacing the word “Very”.
Instead of saying, “I saw my boyfriend with another girl, I was very angry“.
Say, “I was furious” or “I was livid“.

Below is a list of some great words that you can use to replace the word “very”.

My point is, using good vocabulary and idioms will take your writing to the next level. Try that whenever possible.

6. Write frequently.

Make a habit of writing frequently. Just a few lines a day also helps. But in order to do that, there is an obstacle that we face and we don’t even know about it. I will tell you about the obstacle and how to fix it, in a few minutes.

Writing well is a skill, and a skill can be developed just like a muscle. If you buy a dumbbell, and perform just 10 dumbbell curls every day, soon you will notice that your bicep is getting stronger and stronger and one fine day the nerve in your bicep becomes visible and your entire arm looks amazing. Same goes with writing.

Writing skills can also be developed in the same way. On day 2, you are already carrying the experience of yesterday, of writing 4 lines. Your brain will automatically do better with that experience. Then Day 3, 4 and so on.

In a few days, you will become amazing at writing, trust me.

One more thing to be cautious of here.
Imagine this, you decided to write 5 lines about your day before sleeping every day.

Day 1 went well.
Day 2 also went well.
You became a little busy on day 3 and you couldn’t write. After 2 weeks, you realized “Oh shit I didn’t write for 10 days !!!”.

This is the turning point, pay attention!
So you forgot to write or couldn’t write after a couple of days. This happens to EVERYBODY. It is very very common.

This is how people react to this situation, they immediately start giving themselves negative suggestions like, “Oh I didn’t finish this commitment also, just like all my previous plans, I couldn’t do this. I always fail… Bla Bla Bla…” Stop it.

You are doing more damage to yourself than you realize.

This is how a winner would react. This is how I want you to react.
So you forgot to write after a couple of days… That’s ok, you still wrote 2 days right? That is a good thing. Let’s start writing again, let’s write something now and if you are busy, let’s write tonight.

If you treat yourself with kindness, you will see amazing results.

Did you observe what happened when you react like a winner? It is impossible to fail. Did you get busy again and could not write for another month, or 6 months? No problem, start again on the 1st day of the seventh month. We fail only when we stop trying.
Give yourself some credit, treat yourself with kindness, and results will come.

Now let’s talk about the obstacle. I didn’t tell you about the obstacle before, because this obstacle is the reason why you didn’t write after 2 days. So now you will surely understand it better.

When we finally sit down to write something, did you wonder why it feels extremely difficult? You just have to write a few words about something, but it feels really really difficult. That is because you are trying to be perfect. Your mind is feeling uncomfortable because if you write a bad sentence, it will forever be accounted on your name. We need to stop that, there is a brilliant technic that famous writers use.

“Write like no one is going to see it”.

First, create a private environment for yourself. There are several ways to do it.
1. Create a new Gmail account, only keep the password in your mind and don’t save it on your browser. You can keep writing in your Gmail and no one will ever see it.

2. Create an Evernote account and set a password for it. There are several other ways but the main point is,
Whatever is in your mind, just write it, DO NOT look for perfection. This is the road to perfection.

The only goal in the early days of writing is to “Write down”. Expect bad content, it will be imperfect in the beginning and that is perfectly fine.

7. Always, always, always proofread before sending.

Go and check a piece of writing of yours from the past. For example, Read your sent text messages, or sent emails or an essay or anything that you have written in the past. You will be surprised to see some mistakes that you made.

We always make mistakes that we don’t realize.

When it comes to writing, the best way to catch these mistakes is by taking a second look before sending it out.

Some examples of my own:
I was looking at my old Facebook comments and I saw this.
I posted a comment, “He was one of my good friend, I really miss him.“

Did you notice the mistake? I corrected this mistake for nearly a hundred people and still, I made this same mistake.

“One of….” should always be followed by a plural “One of my friends…“

Obviously, people who read that comment will assume that I am bad at English.

Another example,
On my first day at work, I sent this to my manager.
“I will check if their is any problem with the data..’‘

I realized this only after a few weeks and obviously, my manager would have thought that I don’t know the difference between there and their. He probably thought that I am bad at English and it created a very bad first impression.

That is why we always need to read our text before sending it out or finalizing it.

Another funny example:
A husband went on a vacation alone and texted his wife,
“I wish you were her.“
He wrote her instead of here.
I will leave it to your imagination, how much trouble he got into.

So remember, always proofread before hitting the send button.

8. Read a lot.

This one might surprise you but yes, reading improves writing. When you are reading, you are reading someone’s writing. You are exposing yourself to different writing styles, you learn new words, and new ways of using phrases, you learn grammar, and as a result of all this, you will build your own writing style.

If you are still not convinced, let’s consider a simple example.

Imagine this, you started your own business, a coffee shop. But you are completely new to this, so you are struggling to find the best way to arrange things in your coffee shop. Things like, how to arrange the tables and chairs, What is the dress code of your waiters, where to put coffee mugs and trays etc…

Now imagine, you visited 10 different coffee shops of other people, you will instantly get invaluable ideas about how things in your coffee shop can be arranged and presented. You need not necessarily copy their arrangement as it is, but you will develop your own style from all that knowledge.

In the same way, reading a lot will undoubtedly boost your writing skills.

9. Stay away from slangs.

Slangs are basically creations of teenagers. You won’t find them in any dictionary, but slang is widely used in social circles.
I am not asking you to avoid slang completely. Learn them, be aware of them, but don’t use them anywhere in your writing.

For example,
Bruh is slang for Bro, which itself is a short form of Brother.
Dope means awesome.
Fire also means awesome.
Sus means suspicious.

Slangs are good for talking, casual chatting and having fun. But try to avoid these in your writing, both formal or informal.

Conclusion:

I will keep adding more tips to this list as I discover and test them. If you take even 50% of this advice and apply, I guarantee that you will see amazing results. If you need more guidance, or if you have questions, you can leave a comment or directly reach out to me on my Instagram. Good luck.