Steps to Improve Your Writing Skills
Writing skills strike fear into the heart of a lot of people who are not used to writing for a living or on the regular basis. But, at the same time, content marketing is shaping up as one of the most important marketing skills.
It has become really very beneficial to have a grip on quality writing skills to solidify your career.
Now, in order to learn quality English, you will have to undertake the following steps which will help improve your writing skills quite efficiently. When I was a young learner trying to improve my writing skills, I also had to undertake all this for a long long time. Only then, I got able to write quality English. The same I have been trying to inculcate in my students for years now.
1. Do Your Research Work
Whenever you want to write on some topic, you should make a thorough research before you pen it down. Everybody makes mistakes, but your research in this context will enable you to make minimum statistical and grammatical mistakes.
Sourcing and attribution must be authentic in any case; otherwise, your writing, as well as your credibility, will become doubtful.
Informative, statistical and grammatical research will boost up your confidence level and you will feel quite comfortable with your writing. No doubt, it will consume a lot of your energy and time as a lot of young learners think in the beginning, but its reward is just marvelous. The same happened with a lot of my students with the same outcome in the end. So, do it for sure.
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2. Go to the Basics Once
A number of learners think it below them to go to the basics once again at some later stage in their respective professional careers. Actually, they are never willing to admit that their grip on the basics is poor and they should improve it thoroughly. The same happened many times in my teaching career that I had to convince a lot of my students to go through the basics once more. Willy-nilly, they did so, yet were rewarded a lot.
The same will go for you as well and before you start your writing in actual, you must brush up on the basics of grammar at least once from some good book available in the market or online.
Moreover, you may also join a workshop or a night class for your improvement in this regard. A lot of people around you will tell you about this or you may also search it yourself online. Select one of the many content marketing groups to get yourself introduced to like-minded writers.
Now, what you actually have to do is to pick a topic, write something, listen to the feedback of the group and then revise it to perfection.
3. Imitate the Writers You Admire
This is the area which benefited me the most. I openly admit that I really learned a lot from the fabulous writing of the great writers of the world. Their writing style and the grammatical formations of long sentences polished me a lot and I unconsciously started following them
Similarly, everybody likes the writing style and the thematic approach of a few writers and prefers to read their work on a regular basis. if the same is the case with you, try to identify what it is you enjoy most about their work and if you can use it to improve your writing skills. You can adapt their writing techniques for writing different types of articles or essays.
With the passage of time, you will eventually develop your own writing skills and style by observing their constructive work keenly. Obviously, you will never like to copy the actual writing but will prefer to take a lead to be able to write equally good.
4. Make an Outline Before You Put It Down
The best tool for the learners to learn quality writing is to practice making the sketch of what they are going to write. Keeping the importance and utility of this tool in mind,
I have always advised the learners to follow it. Sketching out an outline before you start writing what you have planned will facilitate you a lot.
It will serve you the way a battle plan helps the commander win the war or a roadmap guides a traveler on a road trip. Do your maximum to keep your outline quite simple, just showing in proper order what points you are going to discuss in your piece of writing. Your outline will bring you back to the original topic if you happen to go astray.
5. Edit Your Work Critically and Ruthlessly
Now, when you have been writing for quite some time, this is the time to become a harshest critic and editor of your own work.
In the beginning, it will prove very tough for you just like it did for many others before you, for a beginner writer always values his efforts too much. He is never willing to delete or rework something from his early drafts.
Over a few months, you will get convinced that first drafts are almost always crap. Ponder hard to develop the attitude it requires to eliminate the extraneous words. Also, try your level best to resist the temptation to wax lyrically and get to the point.
I had always been absolutely unbiased in this regard. The more you criticize your own work, the more quality you bring to it is my firm belief.
Closing notes
By following the above steps, we can conclude that developing the writing ability always requires hard work and practice on the part of the learner.