Improving your writing skills is one of the key goals of any newbie writer. Fear of not having engaging content or making grammatical mistakes always pushes people away from writing. Here are a few tips to make you more confident about writing. There are 12 essential tips to help you improve your creative writing procedure:
1. What is Your Purpose
Always write with purpose, you need to have a clear idea of where you are going before you start. Research and planning your writing is a great way to start. writing without purpose will get you nowhere and you will be stuck with endless thoughts without writing a single word.
2. The Magic Word Readers Cannot Resist
Engaging readers is one of the biggest reasons for copywriters, bloggers, and business writers. There is one word that readers cannot resist and that word is and that word is “YOU”.
If your writing contains more YOU’S and fewer WE’s or WE ARE’s, your readers will be more engaged with your writing.
3. Your Actual Point
What is the Lead in your writing
WHO?
Who is my reader,
What’s Their Job Title,
What’s their Age and Gender,
Is English Their First Language
Who is NOT my Reader
WHAT?
What Do I want my Readers to Do
What’s My Big Ask
What does my reader need to know
What don’t I need to say
WHY?
Why should I bother reading this
What are you telling me this
Why should I care about this
What should I take action
What’s in it for me
4. Don’t Get it Right, Get it Written
Quote: Writing is the Art of Second thoughts.
This is the # 1 habit that sets great writers apart. Your main focus should be on the rewriting of your first draft. You should divide the attention of your writing by following:
- 20% Research
- 5% Planning and Ordering
- 15% Writing
- 50% Rewriting
- 10% Proofreading
As you can see from the above structure how giving 50% importance to the rewriting procedure. Which can change your way of writing and makes you more confident.
I discuss this bit when I was reviewing Udemy’s Writing with Confidence Course.
5. Knowing your Readers – Write for One Reader
Why knowing your readers is the starting point of all great writing. Developing empathy with your readers must be an essential goal of every writer.
But most importantly knowing your readers doesn’t mean that you have to know all of your readers. It means you have a keep a specific person in your mind. They are maybe people in your close circle e.g. a Family member or a friend or an office colleague. Think about that person and write and you can imagine what will be that person’s opinion about that particular piece of writing.
6. The “So What” Test
Have you ever worked in a marketing firm or have you ever tried to sell something? You must know that there is a difference between explaining the Features and Benefits of a particular product. So a marketer always goes for the Benefits Led writing because bringing out the benefits is like seeing through their eyes. This is not limited to sales or marketing, making your writing led with benefits will always impact your reader and they will feel a connection with it.
7. How Readers Read and what to do about it
Satisficing is the term used by many famous writers to explain a reader’s mentality. Which is a combination of two words
Satisfying + Sufficing
A reader should feel satisfied and suffice with your writing and how you can achieve it
- Use short paragraphs
- Use heading and subheadings
- Use meaningful subjects line in
- Use bullet points to make it more clear
- Leave out the stuff that they don’t need to know
8. The Inverted Pyramid Method
This is one of the major methods to improve your writing. The way we were taught in school about writing is that you first have to introduce your writing then a little bit of gibberish and then you will come to the actual point. In real-world a reader is a busy person he/she doesn’t have time to go through all nonsense gibberish, they need to know about the message the right way to use this inverted pyramid method for your writing:
Most Important
Less Important
Less Important
Least Impotant
9. Empathy Mapping
Keeping a specific person in our mind we will exercise the empathy mapping test
- How they See
- How they hear
- What they say/do
- think/feel
keep a specific person in mind and write about all the above elements about that person and you will understand how your reader should feel.
10. Max 24 Words in a Sentence
And you should always, always keep the length of your sentences under 24 words. Yup that is a limit, more than that your reader will start to lose interest.
11. Very Helpful Online Tools
There are a few Online Tools that can help a lot in your writing process:
So check out these above tools and share your opinions in the comment section.
12. Online Courses
There are a lot of paid and free courses available on the internet some of the best sources are listed below:
I do hope these techniques will help you sharpen your inside writer.
Heya! I realize this is kind of off-topic but I needed to
ask. Does building a well-established website like yours take
a large amount of work? I am completely new to blogging but I
do write in my journal on a daily basis. I’d like
to start a blog so I can share my experience and feelings online.
Please let me know if you have any ideas or tips for new aspiring blog owners.
Thankyou!