11 Ways to Write Better | The Minimalists

Expand your vocabulary to make your writing more precise.

There’s no need to use a ten-dollar word when a ten-cent word will suffice, but having more tools in your toolbox will allow you to select the most appropriate tool for the job.

Pick one new word each day, and then use it at least 21 times in your conversations with others that day. The most useful words will stick, and your vocabulary will expand over time.

If you want to improve your writing, write every day. Writing is a muscle: if you don’t use it, you lose it.

The best way to guarantee consistent writing is to start a blog.

To add variety, velocity, and cadence to your writing, play around with different punctuation: periods, commas, em dashes, colons, semicolons.

Short, succinct sentences communicate tension. Longer, run-on sentences, on the other hand, help establish a frantic, hurried rhythm—a feeling that the pace is picking up as the words tumble onto the page.

Blogs, books, and social media posts are littered with unnecessary intros, solipsistic digressions, and avoidable drivel. Ditch the nonsense and state your points.

When in doubt, delete your first two paragraphs and see whether the writing improves.

Our time and our attention are two of our most precious resources. It is selfish to force a reader to spend fifteen minutes reading something you could’ve—and should’ve—communicated in 90 seconds.

If you want to earn your reader’s trust, don’t waste their time.

For every hour you spend writing, spend three hours editing, shaping your work into something more concise, more powerful—more beautiful.

Writing truly is rewriting.

Every sentence must serve a purpose: Your first sentence must make the reader want to read the second. The second sentence must propel the reader to the third. So forth and so on until the very end.

If a sentence doesn’t move the narrative forward—if it doesn’t make the writing more urgent—then it must hit the cutting-room floor, no matter how clever or precious it seems.

A sure sign of amateur writing is the overuse of adverbs, especially -ly adverbs. For example, a woman in a story isn’t incredibly pretty—she’s beautiful; the sky isn’t very blue—it’s azure.

Find the perfect words to avoid using adverbs as crutches.

Learn the rules so you can break them successfully.

There are some books to help them understand the guidelines of good writing such as: Grammatically Correct and Garner’s Modern English Usage .

No matter your level of competency, there’s always room for improvement.

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