Write better in four steps
Want to be taken seriously? Improve your writing skills – and social media presence – in four manageable steps.
Believe it or not, my clients’ expertise doesn’t end at fiction. Many of the writers I work with are professionals who need help with work-specific content for books, blogs and business material. They understand their writing is sub-par, yet they don’t know how to fix it. The inevitable – embarrassing – moment follows.
Mistakes in their posts.
On a much larger scale than a resume, your writing serves as an advertisement for your business. Your goal is to turn readers into raving fans. So how can you, a person without an English or marketing degree, get potential supporters to come back each time you publish?
Improve your writing.
Read
If you’re interested in writing better, read more. If you’re writing in a specific content area or genre, find out who does it best and read their work. If you don’t have time for books, wrap your brain around as many articles and blog posts as you can. Emails from supervisors and mentors, as well as people who focus on good content, count too.
Limited time is not an excuse when you’re trying to improve yourself. You can read articles at lunch or while you’re drinking your morning coffee. You can come up with a million reasons you don’t have time and I’ll continue telling you the same thing.
Tweet
If you argue with yourself about having the time to read, what makes you think your audience isn’t having the same conversation? If you respect your audience’s time as much as your own, you won’t write wordy content.
Twitter’s popularity is proof people want the meat of the message immediately. They don’t want to dig around and search. They want to know what they’re getting into. That’s not to say you can’t write complex sentences. But if you’re writing additional clauses, descriptions or adverbs, well…you’ll be more successful if you don’t.
Practicing on Twitter helps you become more concise. You can throw your pity-party and argue this isn’t true or that it’s unfair. But while you’re stomping, you’re losing readership.
Edit
Dump the words into your first draft and sift through them during revision. This helps with brevity. And typos. Editing is necessary, even for experienced writers. Duh. Why else would people hire me?
If writing is a reflection of thinking, you want people to see you as intelligent, straightforward and convincing.
Repeat
Practice is key. The more you read, write and edit, the better you’ll become. One round of practice doesn’t make you an expert, so keep at it. Every day. I know I’ve mentioned Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule before, but it’s important enough to repeat. Not only will writing more help you get better, but you’ll build your fan base by publishing content on your site and social media.
Using these four steps helps build your audience and improve your writing at the same time. WIN.
• • •
On Thursday (July 24, 2014) at 7 p.m. EST, I’ll be talking about writer’s block, getting the words out, giving fear the finger and a metric ton of other writerly things.
Signup here –> https://rebeccatdickson.com/
I’m excited to finally talk to all of you LIVE.
P.P.S. Can’t make it live? Signup and we’ll send you the recording. 🙂
LOVE this post Becky. As usual you simply bring it every day. Especially enjoy hearing that we can be brief and still have impact. AWESOME! Thank you for your consistent support. 😉
Thanks Becky! Your posts are a perfect motivator for when excuses start creeping in. And when I do write, it’s important to remember to slow down and edit, and be willing to cut the fluff.
You know what I like about your post? It’s brief and to the point, just like you said it should be in your second point.