Advice and tips to improve your writing
There’s plenty of advice out there for improving your writing but sometimes it’s just one tip or technique that’s useful, no matter the subject or channel.
We asked members of the Crocstar content community for the best bit of writing advice they’ve been given. And here, in one handy article, are their replies.
Use the read aloud feature
Reading what I've written out loud - or using the ‘read aloud’ feature to read it for me, helps spot where writing could flow better. The read aloud feature also helps spot how bad PDFs are as it shows the reading order.
- Lisa Riemers
Kill your darlings
Stephen King introduced me to ‘kill your darlings’ which, to me, means don’t let pride in what you’ve written get in the way of what the writing needs to do.
- Simon Thompson
Keep it short
Brevity is beautiful - keep it short, sweet and to the point.
- Jason Smith
Write simply
Write in a way that a child would understand.
- Sofia Henderson
Explain it to a friend
I used to work for an advice charity, and people often got tied up in knots trying to explain benefits and other complicated things in writing, but they could explain them brilliantly to people on the phone. So: “how would you explain it to your mate?" became my staple.
- Etain Nifhearghail
Cut if you’re not sure about it
When in doubt, cut it out. For instance, sometimes you find yourself struggling to make a word fit in a sentence and just using an entirely different word or rearranging the sentence helps.
- Sheida Heidari
Write for understanding, not kudos
Write to help someone understand something, not to make them think how eloquent you are.
- Christine Cawthorne
Help people to complete tasks
There's a lovely bit of advice from Caroline Jarrett about writing to help people complete tasks: if you know enough to say it's correct, you know too much to say it's clear. Which is really just encouragement to test your writing with the people who will use it. Never fails to surprise me how much improved writing can be by testing it with people. Much more useful than relying on spurious readability metrics or tools.
- Karl Turner
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