Writing Tips

When I look back at the teachers that I have had and the advice that I have been given over the years on how to improve my writing style, I realize just how different some of my teacher’s writing advice has been. Because of the wide array of advice I have received from these teachers, I feel that I have benefited largely whether it be from seemingly insignificant advice to important concepts.

The first few lessons I find to be essential to understanding language and how to become a better writer revolve primarily around the conventions of writing. One idea, which one of my teachers required, was to take a piece of your writing and use four different colored highlighters to mark the different sentence styles that you wrote (simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex). This process allows you to adjust your paper to allow for variety in sentence structure, which helps to make your paper flow better. Another idea is to make a list of common overused words and phrases, such as these are, this was, is, etc. These words and phrases specifically often create passive voice phrases which can take away from the messages you are attempting to convey with your writing. By knowing which phrases you, as an individual, overuse, you can go through your paper after the fact and replace these phrases to create a stronger paper.

Other important words of advice are to write your paper, step away from your writing and do something else, and then come back to revise your paper. By doing this, you can clear your head and either get a new perspective when you look back at your paper or possibly rework sections with better and more focused ideas in mind. This piece of advice has help me in particular because when I attempt to write and revise all at the same time, my paper ends up rather choppy sounding because I don’t necessarily revise it as a whole because I’m too focused on the paper I just wrote.

One final piece of advice that I got was that when you begin a paper, you have to first of all know your audience and the hook that audience’s attention. To enforce this concept, this teacher would only finish reading your paper’s if the intro was enticing to the audience in question; this seemed harsh at the time, but now I realize that if you are writing a paper and the person reading it isn’t interested in it from the beginning, either they are going to abandon reading it or their mind is going to wander as they read it. Because of this, and introduction can be one of the most important way to capture the audience’s attention.

Though these pieces of advice only scratch the surface of all of information I have been given over the years about writing, these pieces of advice seemed to stand out in my mind as to what have helped me the most with my writing.