Having good writing skills can be very rewarding. They can go a long way and are useful in different situations. How to elevate your writing skill

Elevate Your Writing Skills With These Four Techniques

Having good writing skills can be very rewarding. They can go a long way and are useful in different situations. A lot of people can have trouble improving their writing skills by making some common mistakes—mistakes that they can’t very easily single out.

In this post, we’re going to be talking about some techniques that you can follow to elevate your writing skills. The benefit of talking about these techniques is that if you are not following them at all, you can start doing that. And if you are doing something similar but incorrectly, you can simply rectify your technique.

Let’s get started.

Four Techniques For Better Writing 

1. Be selective and diverse about your research

A good piece of writing has a good bit of research behind it. As a writer, your job is not just to pen down the words randomly, but to perform proper research that backs it up and makes it credible.

Now, as a writer, there are different ways in which you can conduct research. You can either do it thoroughly and make the resultant content excellent quality-wise, or you can be somewhat haphazard with it.

Obviously, you want to avoid the latter and do the former. But how exactly? Good research can be done if you follow these pointers:

• Look for information provided by reliable sources. Nowadays, a lot of research is done via search engines, and normally, it is okay to trust the 1st page websites (other than the ads). The information provided by such sites can be reliably used and quoted. Of course, other than SERP ranking, there are things that decide the integrity of a source, such as its popularity, method of data collection, and author credentials.
• Be diverse. As the heading states, you have to be diverse in your research. That does not mean that you have to be diverse about the topic of your research since that would lead you to write some shaky content with no direction. That simply means that you should pick a diverse set of sources for your information. Basically, by doing that, you avoid copying one source without realizing it and leaving it to be detected by the readers later on.

There are some other pointers that we could and would give about conducting research, but we made these two a bit long. These two are, don’t get us wrong, pretty important, and you will find yourself doing good research if you stick to those.

2. Always plan before writing

Many a writer can start off their content thinking, “Hey, I’ll just wing it.” Sometimes, they do wing it, but most of the time, due to a lack of planning, they leave out important stuff to mention, and they make the different sections disproportionate in length.

It’s important to plan the content out in two aspects: the sections that it’s going to contain along with the relevant information and the length of each of those sections.

• The benefit of specifying headings and subheadings is that you are able to get an idea of how you want to take the content forward. You get an idea of the info that you want to include to make the content as versatile and comprehensive as possible.
• The benefit of specifying the length of headings and sub-headings is that you don’t mess up the proportion of the explanations when you’re actually writing the content out. Plus, if you have to work within a word limit, this can help you regulate that as well.

3. Prioritize readability, not sounding fancy

This holds true, especially for any new and starting professional writers out there.

If you use fancy words, it makes you feel good. But that’s it. It just makes you feel good, not the client and definitely not the reader.

If someone is reading your content, they’re either hearing your opinion or looking for a solution to a problem, etc. But, if your content has some really hard and recondite words in it (see what I mean?), it’s not actually solving problems; it’s creating them.

The more articulate you are able to be with simpler words is what shows your skill as a writer. Anyone can look up some complex words and put them in writing. That doesn’t impress people. (I don’t know, did the word “recondite” impress you?)

But, of course, readability is not just about the words you use. There is a bunch of other stuff as well, but if we discuss it with the same vehemence as we did the last point, you’ll be reading this post till Spring. So, let’s make them into shorter points.

• Don’t make your sentences too long. We did make this mistake a few times in this post ourselves, but they were some unavoidable situations in our gauging.
• Add images and illustrations to aid the readers in understanding your words. Of course, “readability” is not about images and illustrations, but the latter two elements do make the text more understandable and more reader-friendly.
• Break your content up into sections and sub-sections, i.e., even within headings and sub-headings. This also helps the reader to go through the content easily and quickly understand what is being discussed in all the different parts.

Oftentimes, readability is negatively affected by things such as your sentence structures and your word choices. These types of things can sometimes be undetectable, but collectively, they can make the content look very hard to read.

In situations like this, where your content is not very readable, and you can’t put your finger on the issues, we personally recommend using an online paraphrasing tool. By using a tool, you can basically improve the quality of the content since the tool can easily make changes and resolve the problematic parts during the process.

Of course, this does not mean that you should blindly rely on tools like these every time the issue pops up. That way, you won’t learn anything, and your skills won’t improve. You should use the tools to learn and educate yourself so that you can implement the same changes yourself when the need arises.

4. Always check and proofread your content before finalizing it

This is also a good technique that you should always keep in mind if you are hoping to improve your writing skills. Once again, writing skills not only include the skills that you need to pen down the words. Writing is a whole process, and it has some peripheral steps as well, such as research at the beginning and proofreading at the end.

Proofreading your content before turning it in allows you to make sure that it does not contain any quality-affected errors and mistakes. These types of mistakes can include stuff like spelling and grammar issues, incorrect formatting, and the like.

Basically, when you’re proofreading content, your purpose should be to find any irregularity and anomaly in there—something that is not supposed to exist there.

Instead of talking about what you should be looking for, we’re going to list some tips on how you can find those things effectively.

• When proofreading, it is best to wait a little after you’re done writing. In other words, you should write the content, wait a bit, then read it through. The benefit of doing this is that you’re able to look at the content more objectively, and you don’t just fly over all of the words because you remember them all.
• If you have some specific issues in mind that you would like to find in the content, look for them specifically. The more attention you pay to a particular type of error, the more likely you are to easily find it.
• To get some help in the proofreading process, consider using an online grammar checker. Online grammar checkers can quickly scan the provided content and point out all the errors that it contains. You can save time that way and also find out the errors that you missed.

Conclusion

If you are looking to improve your content writing skills, you can start by following the tips and techniques we’ve discussed in the post above. The important thing to remember about the whole writing process is that it is more than just the actual act of writing. The research you do beforehand and the tweaking you do afterward are all also part of the process.