Don’t just say that something is good or bad; empower your nouns with exciting adjectives that describe what you really think. Adjectives like oppressive, tyrannical, and bloodthirsty are powerful because they portray a strong point of view about something or someone.
Monthly Archives: March 2012
Get Excited About Your Topic
No matter what you have to write about, you should try and get excited about it. The more interest and excitement you put forth, the better your paper will be. Even if your paper topic bores you, this is your opportunity to get creative and think of a way to make it exciting. That’s your challenge and you can do it.
Let Your Writing Be Reader-centric
For creating reader centric, influential writing always have the following rules uppermost in your mind:
- When you write to technical journals and magazines, assume minimum technical knowledge on the part of the readers and accordingly use technical words and jargon;
- When you write to teach through such publications, use technical words and jargon but always remember to add suitable foot-notes;
Fix the Spelling Mistakes
Whatever writing problems you have, you must stop making spelling errors! You can follow these easy steps to eliminate the errors:
- Always write in a robust word processor that has spell-checking capabilities.
- Use the spell-checker; fix the errors it identifies.
- When you use a name whether a person’s name, the name of a team, the name of a place, or even the name of a horse, by gosh, make sure you spell it correctly. Look it up on line if you have even the slightest doubt.
Questions and Writing Ideas
By fostering curiosity, we can create a fountain of ideas. It doesn’t matter what form your writing takes or what genre you’re writing in. By coming up with intriguing questions, you’ll soon find yourself overwhelmed with inspiration. Below are some questions that you can use to generate writing ideas. Mix them up, change them around, and come up with your own list of questions too:
Who
- Who is this story about?
- Who does my main character trust?
- Who in my life could inspire a poem?
- Who does this character/person care about?
What
Catch Your Typos
Nobody likes typos. They look like misspellings, only it’s usually obvious they are mere oversights, the result of tapping the wrong key. It happens a lot when writers rush, and it happens a lot less when writers proofread their work before submitting or publishing. Most writers are going to miss a typo every now and then. Nobody’s perfect. However, when you read a writer’s work regularly and typos are just something you expect every time, that’s a sign of poor or nonexistent proofreading.
Preparing yourself to proof or edit your own writing
- Write at the end of the day; edit first thing in the morning. (Usually, getting some sleep in between helps.)
- Listen to music or chew gum. Proofing can be boring business and it doesn’t require much critical thinking, though it does require extreme focus and concentration. Anything that can relieve your mind of some of the pressure, while allowing you to still keep focused, is a benefit.
- Don’t use fluorescent lighting when proofing. The flicker rate is actually slower than standard lighting. Your eyes can’t pick up inconsistencies as easily under fluorescent lighting.
Editing for content
- Ask yourself who, what, when, where, why, and how when reading for content. Does the text answer all the questions you think it should?
- Highlight the sentences that best answer these questions, just so you can see if the facts flow in logical order.
- Do the math, do the math, and then do the math again. Somewhere between the screen and the printer 2+2 often becomes 3.
- Make a list of “bugaboo” words and do a search for them before final proof. Include every swear word, words related to product terminology, and other words that pop up on occasion. Then do a “find” for all these words.
Clear Sentences
For clarity, it is also important to keep a check on the sentence length. If sentences are too short, your writing will sound immature; if they are too long, the reader will lose track. Sentence length, should therefore, be not too long and not too short. A skillful writer can produce much longer sentences which remain clear and effective. Some topics and some tasks may tend to require longer sentences. What is important is not that you count up every sentence, but that you think about sentence length when writing, monitor your own writing to ensure that the meaning is always as clear as possible, and explore opportunities to vary sentence length when appropriate. Short sentences aid coherence, whilst longer sentences aid cohesion.
Tips to proofread your own work
- Don’t proofread until you’re completely finished with the actual writing and editing. If you make major changes while proofreading, even if it’s just within sentences, you’re still in an artistic, creative mode, not a science mode.
- Make sure you have no distractions or potential interruptions. Shut down all email and social media, hide the cell phone, shut off the TV, radio, or music, and close the door. Print your document if you need to get away from the computer altogether.
- Forget the content or story. Analyze sentence by sentence; don’t read in your usual way. Focus on spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Work backwards, if that helps, or say the words and sentences out loud. Concentrate.

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