9 Proven Ways to Improve Your Writing Skills | FreshyJamz

This article will teach you how to write better ransom notes.

9 proven ways to improve your writing skills will also teach you how to write better love letters, short stories, magazine articles, letters to the editor, business proposals, sermons, poems, novels, parole requests, church newsletters, songs, memos, essays, term papers, theses, graffiti, death threats, advertisements, and shopping lists.

Table Of Content
Nine Ways to Improve Your Writing When You’re Not Writing

1. Get Some Reference Books

2. Expand Your Vocabulary

3. Improve Your Spelling

4. Read

5. Take a Class

6. Eavesdrop

7. Research

8. Write in Your Head

9. Choose a Time and Place

1. Get Some Reference Books

It would be a shame to bring an entire writing project to a halt just because you didn’t know how to spell gyroscope or schnapps. So get a dictionary and keep it in the room where you write, no more than an arm’s length away. In fact, get two. Get a hard cover for its comprehensiveness and a paperback for convenience.

Also, get an encyclopedia. If you can’t afford a big set, get a single volume encyclopedia. And get a thesaurus. Thesaurus means “treasury”; the thesaurus you buy will be a treasury of synonyms, words that are close in meaning to the one you want. It is a book that will lead you to that perfect word you know is loitering on the outskirts of your brain.

Roget’s Thesaurus is arranged in two sections. The first section contains hundreds of clusters of related words and phrases. The second section is an index listing all the words in the first section alphabetically and telling you where they appear in that section.

Let’s say, for example, that in a letter you want to assure the owner of the company you work for that you will most certainly try to recover the four billion dollars you lost on the papier-mâché deal, but recover isn’t quite the word you want to use, and you’re not sure what is. So you whip out your pocket edition of Roget’s Thesaurus, turn to the index, and look up recover. There you’ll find the numbers 660, 775, and 790. You turn to cluster 660 and you find recover along with its cousins rally, revive, pull through, reappear, and others. If you don’t like anything you find there, you turn to the other numbers, and the thesaurus will lead you to redeem, get back, salvage, and so on.

You can find thesauruses in paperback and hard cover, and Roget’s is not the only one. I do not recommend the ones that are arranged solely in dictionary form. They are easier to use but only about twelve percent as useful.

After you have acquired a dictionary, an encyclopedia, and a thesaurus, you can acquire other reference books as time, taste, and money allow. Their importance depends largely on what sort of writing you do and how much.

2. Expand Your Vocabulary

Everybody has heard tips for improving vocabulary. Learn a new word in the morning and use it three times before sunset and it’s yours, etc. There are many books that will help you stretch your vocabulary. The best known one is Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary by Wilfred Funk and Norman Lewis (Funk and Wagnalls). Read that book or one like it.

But the most important vocabulary for the writer is not the one that will take in uxorious tomorrow and soubrette the next day. It’s the one he or she already has. For the writer of average intelligence and education, learning new words is much less important than learning to use easily the words he or she already knows.

Think for a minute. How many synonyms can you come up with for the noun plan?

There are program, itinerary, scheme, design, agenda, outline, and blueprint. If you concentrated for a minute, you might have come up with ten words that you already knew. But how many of them would have come easily to mind while you were writing a letter to the boss about your potentially lucrative new ... uh ... plan?

The only way to make your vocabulary more accessible is to use it. If you want all those short but interesting words waiting at the front of your brain when you need them, you must move them to the front of your brain before you need them.

Stop to think about other word possibilities when you write, and eventually they will come so quickly that you won’t have to stop.

3. Improve Your Spelling

There aren’t many firm rules that apply to the spelling of English words. Mostly, good spelling is a matter of forming the right mental associations and developing an eye for words that look a little weird.

In the dictionary, look up any word that you’re not sure of. If you have been misspelling it, write it correctly ten times. Invent a visual image for the correct spelling. For example: The Sahara desert only has one s, like Sahara, but the dessert after a meal has a second s, like a second helping.

How will better spelling improve your writing? Well, for one thing, you won’t write desert when you mean dessert. More important, it will improve your writing by reducing the number of times you annoy the reader. A few misspelled words will jar the reader’s concentration, and a lot of misspelled words will wreck your credibility. Right or wrong, the reader will perceive you as ... well, stupid, to put it bluntly. If you don’t have the respect of the reader, your writing will not work.

Fifty of the Most Commonly Misspelled Words:

4. Read

If you are an a architect, you should certainly read architectural literature. If you are in computers, you must keep up with what’s being written about bits and bytes, demodulation and interlaced fields. Reading the books and trade magazines of your particular field will not only keep you informed, it will show you how experienced writers are turning the jargon and the complexities of your vocation into readable prose.

But no matter what your field of expertise, you should also read books, magazines, and newspapers designed for the general reader.

Though the daily paper contains much that is swill, it also contains some good writing. From it you can learn to write leanly, you can learn to get to the point, and you can learn to compress several facts into a single clear sentence.

If you read paperback detective novels and romances, you will discover how writers create curiosity, and build tension. You will also learn how to construct an event, a person, or a place with just a few well-chosen words.

Read major novels. You will see how words can be used to communicate subtleties and stir emotions, how words can be arranged one way to make you worry, another to make you laugh.

Read magazine articles and you will see how quotes are pared down from lengthy interviews until they contain nothing but the words that matter. Notice how opinions are supported by facts. Watch to see how the writer makes his points by calling on outside help such as scientific reports, quotes from books, surveys, etc.

Read. And listen to what you read. Listen for the sound of the language, the music. Note the punctuation, the spelling, the logical progression of information. And find the things that fail, also. Listen to how two similiar sounds close together can cause a disturbing noise in your head. Hear how the use of the wrong word wakes you from your reading spell. Be a critical reader, and look upon all that you read as a lesson in good writing.

5. Take a Class

If you don’t believe that good writing can be taught, you shouldn’t be reading this book. If you do believe good writing can be taught, you could benefit from a class.

You don’t have to sign up for a three-credit course at the local university. You can find a creative writing or English composition course in most adult education and extension programs.

There are specific courses designed for particular types of writers. For example, there are business writing courses that thoroughly cover the formal English required in business correspondence. A course in nonfiction writing will provide you with some research techniques that you wouldn’t get elsewhere. And a course in writing for television would be invaluable if that’s your interest, as there are many rules of form a scriptwriter must follow.

Generally, a writing course is as good or as bad as the teacher. Good teachers and bad teachers are found at all levels, so ask around.

Whether it’s a course at the local high school or a course at tertiary schools, in my opinion you should steer clear of any teacher who speaks with a British accent but has never been to England and any teacher who insists you must read Moby Dick before writing your first paper. Point yourself toward the eager, unpretentious teacher who is actually publishing stories, articles, and books.

6. Eavesdrop

Be nosy. Listen to conversations on the bus, in the elevator. Screen out the words sometimes and listen only to the music. Tune in to teenagers’ conversations, and you’ll pick up the latest slang. Pretend to be reading on the park bench, and you’ll hear how words are used to convey more than they mean. Find out what people are talking about, what they care about. All of this will help you to communicate more effectively through your writing.

7. Research

Do your fingers sometimes freeze over the typewriter keyboard? Does the paper seem to stare back at you with an accusing eye? The problem could be that you haven’t gathered enough information. You haven’t gotten the facts.

Almost everything you will ever write must be built on a foundation of factual information. That includes opinion pieces and most certainly includes stories, plays, and novels.

Before you write, track down the bits of information you are going to need. You cannot write securely on any subject unless you have gathered far more information than you will use.

Here are four ways to get facts.

1. Look it up. If the facts are not in the books on your shelf, try the company library or the public library. Through the library system, you have access to just about every piece of information in the world, though in some cases the information might have been printed only in Swahili.

2. Ask somebody. Who has the information you need? Is it the chairperson of the canvassing committee? Is it the president of the company? Is it the president’s secretary? 

Ask yourself, “Who would know?” Then go directly to the most logical and best-informed people. And if anybody begins an answer with “Well, gee, Harry, I think maybe that now that you ask, let me see ...” ask somebody else.

3. Observe it. Sometimes the best way to acquire facts is to conduct an experiment. 

4. Speak to the reference librarian. Most libraries offer a reference service. Use it. When you need information and you don’t know where to find it, ask the librarian. He or she will find it, or direct you to the source.

8. Write in Your Head

There was a man working as a reporter for a local newspaper, he used to leave a school committee or selectmen’s meeting around eleven P.M. in Hudson and drive eight miles to the newspaper office in Marlboro, where he would write his stories for the next day’s edition.

Often he arrived after other reporters. But almost invariably he would write his stories, hand them in, and drive home before the others. He was able to do this, not because he was a faster typist, but because he started writing before he got to the office. He wrote the first draft in his head during the drive to Marlboro. In his mind he planned the lead, decided what information he could ignore, and organized my material. By the time he reached the office, he knew what he wanted to write, and when he sat down at the typewriter, it was like pushing the “play” button on a tape recorder. Everything he had recorded in my brain came out.

So if you have a writing job, write in your head. Clear up the inconsistencies while you’re brushing your teeth. Get your thoughts organized while you’re driving to work.

9. Choose a Time and Place

For most writers the hardest part of any writing project is getting started. I often begin by staring at the typewriter as if it is some vile substance that has been spilled on my desk. Then, no matter how alert I was when I arrived at the typewriter, I become almost terminally drowsy. My eyes droop. My shoulders sag. Finally, I begin to think, “Well, maybe I should take a little nap first, then I’ll be well rested for writing.” Usually my puritan conscience cancels that plan. So I take writing done in an undisturbed hour than you would in a dozen ten-minute spurts.

It is also important to find a quiet place to write. Few people can write their best when the phone is ringing and the kids are clamoring for whatever it is that makes kids clamor. A den in a noisy house would probably produce less writing than the back seat of a car in a quiet garage. So find someplace quiet. Is there a day when everybody else is out of the house? Does a friend have a cottage? Does your company have an empty office?

If you can’t find a quiet place to write, use earplugs.

I've come to end of this topic, 9 proven ways to improve your writing skills by saying "without determination, success cannot be achieved. Only when you determine in your heart that you will succeed and add hard work to it, then success is yours. 

Determine in your heart now to start following the 9 proven ways to improve your skills explained above and your writing skills will improve greatly more than you expect. Don't forget to share this articles to your friends...be loving.