to close out this section.
I want to talk about some things you can do to become a better writer.
Overall,
good writing isn't an ability.
You're just born with it,
the skill you have to practice and develop over time.
So the number one thing you can do to improve your writing is to write and write often.
Write in a journal,
use different styles,
cover different topics,
even try your hand at fiction.
What matters is that you're always improving your ability to communicate using the written
word.
If you're looking for some quick,
actionable ways to improve your writing here,
a few tips.
First of all,
one of the best ways to strengthen your writing is to use the active voice as much as you
can.
You see in English.
There are two main voices you can use in your writing.
The active voice in the passive voice.
The distinction is simple.
Is the subject of the sentence doing the action,
or is the subject having the action done to them?
Here's an example.
You could say Louise kicked the ball across the field,
or the ball was kicked across the field by Louise,
which one of these sounds better,
probably the 1st 1 and that's because it uses the active voice.
The subject of the sentence.
Louise is doing the action.
Louise kicked the ball in the second case,
the subject of the sentence.
The ball is having an action done to it.
The ball was kicked.
There are some cases where the passive voice makes sense,
but most of the time you're much better off using the active voice.
Next,
let's talk about contractions.
If you've ever written an academic paper,
you've probably been told not to use contractions.
Words like your there don't aren't isn't and so on.
While contractions may not be appropriate for an academic setting,
blogging tends to be more casual and conversational.
Like I said earlier,
you're not writing an encyclopedia.
You want to match the style and tone of your audience,
and usually that includes using contractions on a similar note.
You want your content to be approachable,
even for people who may not be experts on your topic.
After all,
that's usually why people come to you in the first place because you're the expert.
So I recommend simplifying your vocabulary and avoiding excessive jargon,
a great litmus test for one's understanding of a topic is whether they can effectively
explain it to a child.
Keep that in mind and always imagine you're writing for an audience that has no experience
with your topic unless you know for sure that your audience has a certain level of
knowledge.
For example,
if you write for an audience of physicians,
one of the most important tasks you have to accomplish as a writer is keeping your reader's
interest.
That's especially true in today's world,
where as soon as somebody gets bored,
they're clicking on to something else.
One of the best ways to keep people engaged is to make your content easy to skim short
sentences and short paragraphs ideally broken up by subheadings and images.
If your post is just one giant wall of text,
nobody's gonna want to read it.
Try to break your writing up and make it easier to digest.
The next thing we need to discuss is one of the most common pitfalls in writing,
and that is an overuse of modifiers like adjectives and adverbs.
Adverbs in particular,
are often unnecessary,
and I don't think I could explain it any better than Stephen King in this great excerpt
from his book on writing.
Consider the sentence.
He closed the door firmly.
It's by no means a terrible sentence.
At least it's got an active verb going for it.
But ask yourself if firmly really has to be there.
You can argue that it expresses a degree of difference between he closed the door and he
slammed the door and you'll get no argument from me.
But what about context?
What about all the enlightening not to say emotionally moving prose,
which came before he closed the door firmly.
Shouldn't this tell us how he closed the door?
And if the foregoing pros does tell us,
isn't firmly an extra word,
isn't it redundant?
That's the end of the quote by Stephen King.
I always reference that when I talk about over using adverbs,
the idea here isn't to use zero adverbs just to use them sparingly and finally,
editing.
Is Justus important as writing Now you could hire an editor to look over your work,
but I think self editing is a valuable skill that people too often neglect.
After you write your first draft,
walk away for a bit,
do something else and then come back when your mind is fresh.
At this point,
you want to start cutting your content down.
Be merciless here.
You want your writing to be as clear and concise as possible,
so you have to remove the fluff.
Keep in mind that every piece of content should have one core idea or solve one main
problem.
Anything that doesn't contribute to that should be cut.
And by the way,
even if you're great itself editing,
it still doesn't hurt to run your content by somebody else just to get a fresh perspective
.
So that's it.
Those air some of the most actionable pointers I can offer you if you want to improve your
writing and create better content.
Like I said,
it does take time and effort to develop the skill of good writing.
But those are all things you can start doing to become a more effective writer today,
so I hope you put them into action