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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