Practical Tips to Improve Your Writing
Writing is thinking, according to scholar Deirdre McCloskey, and like mathematics, writing can be learned. I recently read McCloskey’s book Economical Writing and was reminded of many practical writing tips that can improve your writing today. I chose to include the following five tips for this post, but there are many more where these came from!
1. Clarity. The number one rule of writing is for your writing to be clear. If the reader thinks what you write is unclear, then it is, by definition. One way to improve the clarity of your writing is to walk away from it for a week and come back to it. If you don’t have that kind of time, then ask a friend (or editor) to proofread your work and tell you what sentences are unclear.
2. Avoid this, that, these, and those. When you use “this” in your writing, you’re causing your reader to look back to the thing being referred to. When you do this, you are causing your reader to look away, negatively affecting the forward flow and leaving the reader looking for her place. Consider repeating the word represented by “this.” Repetition brings clarity and unity to English.
3. Paragraphs should have points. The paragraph should be a complete discussion of one topic. If your paragraphs are too long the reader will skip a lot of your stuff to get to the next break.
4. Control your tone. Tone of writing is like tone of voice. Get rid of “-ly” words. These adverbs drive up the emotional pressure of verbs of adjectives. Cross through every “very,” “absolutely,” and “purely.” Most things are not very. Most things are not absolute or pure, so to claim so conveys a falsely emphatic tone. Keep your opinions pretty much to yourself.
5. Avoid elegant variation. The first duty in writing a sentence is to make it clear. A way to make it clear is to use one word to mean one thing. Elegant variation uses many words to mean one thing, with the result in the end that the reader, and even the writer, don’t quite know what is being talked about. Avoid doing this while writing.
Happy Writing & Revising,
Dr. Jessica Parker, Owner & Dissertation Coach