Improve your Writing (Improving Style)
Last time I spoke about this sexy smart suit you put on your writing to make it look really good. Now I will be telling you how to wear this suit and what to match with it to make it look even better.
Your style has a huge influence on your writing and how strong your writing is. Remember you want to make your writing look crispy and clean, I am sure if you do this your readers will be captivated by your writing.
You might have some smart ideas, quotes and some really great sentences. But if they don't match or go together then your writing looks like this picture, just no... its bad and never do this!
Strong verbs
Image credit
If your topic and writing is heavy and deep, make sure to have some great expressive verbs to back it up.
"To be" verbs, well chuck all those away and get creative, verbs are the make and break of your sentence strength.
Examples: From this link
Weak: My brother was being mean.
Stronger: My brother threw the ball at my face.
Weak: The sun was really bright on the snow.
Stronger: The sun shone brightly on the snow.
Weak: Being a nice person is a good way to be happy.
Stronger: Kindness leads to happiness.
Avoid Passive Voice Constructions
This is when your subject sits at the end of your sentence or when it is awkwardly placed within the sentence. Make sure your subject is before your strong verb in the sentence.
Examples: From this link
Passive: The election’s outcome was decided by the Supreme Court.
Active: The Supreme Court decided the election’s outcome.
Passive: The suspect was being held in custody by the police.
Active: The police held the suspect in custody.
Passive: Accusations were made and feelings were hurt. (Who accused? Whose feelings were hurt?)
Active: The supervisor accused his coworkers and hurt their feelings.
Increase Sentence Variety
Never use the same sentence format or pattern, you will just end up putting your reader to sleep. Changing this can be hard and you might struggle to find them. To help with this make sure you have different lengths of sentences, to many short sentences will make your writing seem childish, but very long sentences will make you loose your reader.
Avoid using phrases that the reader could guess (Clichés). But this also means that you don't use the same amazing phrase, you made up, over and over again. The trick is to keep your readers attention, do the unexpected in your writing.
Just on a little side note for self improvement. I will be doing pushups, situps and squats for the amount of $$$ I earn on this post and will give a short feedback every day at the end of each post. This will be split in equally between all 3. Any not done will carry onto the next day.
Thank you for the informative post. I have always been upset with myself for not paying better attention in 9th grader English class. I hope you continue to come out with these types of articles as I am sure they are not only helpful to me, but the Steemit community as a whole. Cheers!
Great information! English is not my mother tongue and I know somehow I am weak in the lanuage. The point you mentioned, esp. the vocab, passive and sentence structure are definitely what I should improve! Thanks for your reminder and I would try my effort to learn though it's a long long way!
Even I am not great when it comes to that, many things take a long time to learn and it can be a mission to edit your own writing. But I am sure it is worth it in the end. Thank you for your lovely comment , glad you found it useful.
Thanks for the tips, I guess it's these little things you don't realise that can make a big difference.
The smallest things done right always make the biggest difference when added up
thanks for this valuable article.
after this my writing skills are like this :) ;)
Hahaha I love this gif, thank you.
i love this too :) it's one of the best gif i have ever seen.
The typing gifs are always the best.
I'm normally not a huge fan of cliche cat images/gifs/videos... but this actually made me cry laughing how do i resteem this
I must say, often I feel as if I am picking up more from your articleshere than I could from apaying "creative writing" course.
Thanks for writing about this topic.
Wow ok thank you for your comment. I am busy with an English writing course and these posts are what I share from the course.
Recommended! Will improve my German English!
Great piece of advice. It will surely help me to write some more especially now when i joined steemit and also i'm not a native speaker as well. Means a lot, will try to implement all your points into my work.
Not only i'll try to use stronger words, but also i would like to use wider variety of words cause i'm really bored and even angry at myself when i use too often words like "good" or "bad".
Good luck!
hahaha well best of wishes and luck for your future on steemit. I am sure you are going to love it here.
Wow...great post..& you are the great tutor..while reading your post, I feel , I am doing my IELTS/TOFFEL preparation. I am afraid to comment on your post, because I am not good at English, though I tried...If I made any mistake, please correct me on free of cost.
I am learning here in steemit with free of cost and also making some money... UPvoted
This is a great place to learn, reading is one of the best ways to learn how to write English. So keep going and your writing will improve :D
Ya..hope so..thank you for the nice reply...:))
I upvote you. I follow you, you follow me back.
For daily nice posts.
These are great tips especially for non-native speakers like myself. However I think there are those that are natural word-smiths. Also you could bet that those who write well have a reading rate (in number of books) that far exceeds those who don't.
Yes I have to agree that reading and writing go along, the more you read the more you know and when you write you will know that the sentence is wrong because you have read so much and you know when a sentence sounds right.
How I wish I have time to read :) I have friends who've read thousands of titles in their lifetime.