10. Follow the rules, and then unfollow the rules

We are all writers now. Whether you write books, blog posts, emails, Instagram captions, or text messages, you are a writer.

No matter your preferred medium, here are a few tips to help you write more effectively.

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 rhyt...

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 mo...

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.

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.

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.

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

For daily tips and writing-related articles, you can follow several channels, blogs or newsletters.

Before hitting the send button, review your text: spelling, content, punctuation.

Ask yourself: What am I attempting to communicate ? What am I attempting to express ?

Be more deliberate with your most common form of casual writing, and you’ll automatically become ...

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, an...