Recently, I skimmed this article on “16 Ways to Improve Your Writing Skills.” While I thought the article was a tad bit long, I really loved all the tips.
But the two I adored the most are things I still do now – even though I’m no longer a journalist.TIP ONE – The BEST way to improve your writing is to read other’s work. For me, this was mostly reading the work of other reporters when I was a journalist. I analyzed their sentence structures and how they used grammar. I must admit, I’m not very good at grammar and can’t really tell you all the technical parts of a sentence. I think I was asleep or drawing pictures during that part of elementary instruction. Anyhow, my writing improved leaps and bounds when I became a serious reader and analyzer.
TIP TWO – Your first draft is always going to be crap. Yes, that’s right! Now this doesn’t mean you should procrastinate. When I was a journalist, the easiest and quickest way for me to meet deadlines was to put everything I knew about the story or interview down on paper/computer. Then, if there was enough time for me to take a break that’s what I would do. The strategy was to come back and curse at myself (not out loud) for writing those bad sentences. But through the second look, I was able to correct, read out loud to catch errors and make sense of it all.
MMY Content Creator 