3 Stages to Improve Your Writing

By Joshua B.

Everyone writes at a different level, and no two pieces of writing are exactly alike. Things like word choice, use of punctuation, and paragraph structure can play off each other to create a unique writing style, and hopefully get people engaged in what you’ve chosen to write. Let’s take a look at how to build a respectable style, and write not just effectively, but with confidence and even (hopefully) a degree of elegance. This article identifies three stages of writing, each one building from the one before it.

So without any further introduction, here is the first step—

1) Learn the rules.

No, seriously. I mean it- with as much emphasis as I can pack into this font: Learn the rules!

How can you properly employ any tool without understanding how it works? Writing without understanding the language is like stumbling over a chainsaw, gassing it up and wandering off to go cut a tree. How are you supposed to know what to do? You’re just as likely to hurt yourself as you are to trim something down properly . . . and in this case, what’s at stake aren’t limbs, arboreal or otherwise, but the grade on your English paper.

That said, not many people these days can be blamed for not having great grammar. Public schools, as well as plenty of private schools, are dropping basic grammar training in favor of jumping directly into writing THE FIVE-PARAGRAPH ESSAY: in other words, how to build an argument, create an outline for the argument, support the argument points, and conclude the essay.

First of all, this probably stifles creativity, but I can hardly blame the system for not wanting people to think for themselves, so it gets a pass. But there’s another huge flaw here, and it’s this. Would we teach kids advanced Calculus before they could add or subtract? Should engineers be building bridges without knowing whether or not they’re going to collapse?

If those examples seem extreme, they are, but at the same time, they aren’t. This is exactly what we’re doing to the English language. We’re ignoring the basics; teaching each other how to build bridges without first understanding how bridges work.

Dangerous? Of course! But there is an upside, and it’s that very few people who write poorly are actually at fault for it. All most people need to do is be taught, and then practice what they’ve learned.

For that, there’s one book that I can recommend (and by “I”, I mean English professors across the world, not to mention Stephen King (On Writing, p.11)): The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White. It’s a slim book, but it contains just about everything you’ll ever need to know about punctuation, sentence structure, frequently confused words, and much more.

Understanding the rules of the language is the first step- the cornerstone of good writing. To build from there, we move up to step two.

2) Focus on the purpose of your writing.

“Practice makes perfect” is true with most things—but in writing, it’s more like, “Practice makes as good as how you write about a certain situation.” That’s because writing is so subjective. If I enjoy this book more than, say, this one, this one, or even this one, then who is anyone else to say that the first book isn’t just as great as the other three?

Well . . . maybe everybody else on the planet.

See, writing isn’t like other areas of study. Take math, for instance. For the most part, math is a self-contained science; numbers speak exclusively of other numbers, and one calculation leads to another—it’s all very logical and closed-off.

Writing, on the other hand, almost always has an outside purpose. A news article isn’t written just to be written; it’s written to inform. An editorial is written to persuade, and a novel or short story either to entertain or to make some general point about the state of the human condition (or some such idealistic nonsense). So if no one else liked that first book, then the majority opinion is that it’s pretty much an awful book.

The point is that writing is directed at people. So if I can’t write a persuasive essay without actually persuading anybody, then it’s not a persuasive essay—It’s worthless, it’s sad, and it’s really no better than a pile of toilet paper. And if my short story can’t entertain people (or convince them to send money to starving children in some third-world country, or whatever), then it’s not really a short story. It’s just a bunch of words on a page that doesn't mean anything on their own.

So if you want your writing to do what writing exists to do—affect people—then there are three things you should focus on.

1. Sound intelligent, in general. This goes back to the first step. Take this style of writing for example:

“If i use a semicolon; when i could use a comma, or just nothing at all—if u dont use punctuation or spel words write—no one wil lissen to us.”

Ack! Not only will this kind of writing make people doubt your credibility, but also it is physically painful to read. Spellcheck is a great invention, and there’s no reason not to take advantage of it. If you aren’t sure about a word, use a dictionary to find out if it means what you think it means, or just use a different word. The beauty of the English language is that every word has about a thousand synonyms, so there’s always something else you could use that means about the same thing. And finally, proofread. Nothing looks worse than a typo in the first sentence of an essay.

2. Sound intelligent, specifically. You should always know what you’re talking about. For a history paper, this means doing research. It means that, if you’re writing a short story, you should know your characters better than they know themselves, and convince the reader that you have some brilliant plan for where the story is going (even if you don’t). And always, always, always write with confidence. If you sound like you know what you’re talking about, you’ll be a lot more convincing—even if you don’t know anything at all. Confidence is no substitute for hard knowledge, but it’s a lot better at making people listen to you.

3. Read. Read whenever you can. Pick whichever news site fits your political biases, and read that in the morning. Find a novel that can hold your attention. It doesn’t have to be high-browed “literature”; YA fantasy novels can be just as well written and entertaining as anything else, and even Twilight can help you strengthen your grasp of language and grammar. (Wow. Okay—if my typing fingers had mouths, I would be washing them out with soap.) But reading, seeing the words on the page, and paying attention to what rules come into play and when is the best way to improve writing. Even Twilight.

3) Craft a style, and stay consistent.

An essay can be good, or it can be great. It’s mostly up to the reader, but there are ways the writer can help the reader along. The chief among these is style.

Have a voice! Don’t just be a dry, boring collection of words on a page. It doesn’t matter if you have the cure to cancer, or if you know the answer to the meaning of life—No one will bother reading it, or being moved by it, if it’s written in a boring way.

Compare these two passages. Each one starts the same short story. Think about which one sounds better, which one is more interesting, and which one would make you want to keep reading.

I went into the doctor’s office to get an MRI. I hate MRIs because I have claustrophobia because when I was a little kid something bad happened which I will talk about later. They thought I might have cancer, so I was really scared. And I knew I had to do the MRI but I still didn’t want to.

Or:

In the end, it turned out I didn’t have cancer. It was a genetic condition, easily controlled through medication, and not even that dangerous—not by cancer standards, anyway. Back then, however, we didn’t know that, so I was on thin ice mentally even before the MRI. All week was a kind of nervous high-wire walk; I was eager to get the test done and over with, yet dreading what it might spell out for my future.

I shouldn’t have worried so much. They fixed me right up.

Writing may be subjective, but I think (and hopefully you do too) that that second passage was MUCH more interesting than the first. It’s not perfect, not by a long shot, but it’s also not terrible.

Why is it so much better? It has a voice. It uses some metaphors, provides conflict, and is more linguistically tense than the first passage. It doesn’t use more words than it needs to, and it sounds a lot better when you read it aloud.

Ultimately, style is about how good the words sound when you read them aloud.

That’s all.

Superficial? Yes.

Necessary? Absolutely.

For the most part, style is a one-two punch, made up of sentence-and-paragraph structure and punctuation. The most basic rule of making things sound good is this: shake it up. Vary the length of sentences. Have a long sentence, with two or three commas and an em-dash—at the right place, of course, otherwise it will look strange—and then follow it up with a shorter sentence. This gives the reader a break. Then maybe experiment with punctuation; a semicolon can unite two sentences that are about the same length, and adds some flair and a dash of sophistication.

Those are the very basic points of style. There’s a lot more, most of it covered in books like The Elements of Style, but you can only go so far by reading about something. Do it for yourself—write stuff! If that’s all you walk away with from this article, then that’s fine with me—write stuff. Your grade will thank you, and you’ll sound a heck of a lot smarter on your college admittance essays. Let yourself build an understanding of the language, pay attention when you read, and pretty soon you’ll be cranking out great, compelling essays as easily as you fall asleep at night.

With coffee.

Maybe.