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Read more often, and more widely
Reading is the only way to nurture your writer’s brain, so read often and read broadly. Making a habit of reading will expose you to different styles of writing and ways of structuring articles and content, which will benefit your own pieces.
Read a tonne. Reading fiction will help writers learn about narrative structure, while non-fiction from celebrated authors can give lessons on writing concisely and clearly.
Josh Krissansen, the managing director of copy-writing company Bloggerboy
Make sure to read a lot of online content from other brands and your competitors, too. After all, analyzing your competition can help boost your own content marketing, as this guide demonstrates. As well as finding great articles to help inform your own writing decisions, analyzing competing content will also show you examples of bad work. These can help you avoid making similar mistakes by yourself in future.
Think about structure
You might write a beautiful sentence and have an incredible command of the language, but if your structure is not up to standard, your message will be unclear, or perhaps even confusing.
It’s important that your content is ordered logically, leading the reader through your arguments or ideas point by point. You should assume knowledge of your reader, so make sure you build your articles like a house:
Make the most of templates and workbooks
If you’re asking how to become a better copywriter, this Ultimate Semrush Content Writing Workbook is free to download. Perfect for copywriters, content marketing specialists and anyone else who wants to either start a career as a writer, it will help reinforce the writing skills you have already developed.
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People with strong writing skills are perceived as more reliable and trustworthy. Honing in this skillset with not only help you in your current role but will help you move up the corporate ladder. A study by Grammarly noted that those with fewer grammatical errors in their writing correlated to more promotions and higher salaries.
This doesn’t mean emails and reports without grammar errors are a quick shot to CEO, but it does create more credibility. When you come across composed and well written (or spoken), opportunities will be offered to you. In most jobs you will spend one third of your time writing and 73% of managers want employees who excel at this skill.
Think about it this way, if you received an email with poor sentence structure, and a bunch of typos, no matter how great this employee was, your thoughts may be more likely to point to them being unreliable, lazy or negligent.
Building this skillset will set you apart from others, especially in the worlds of technology and engineering, where many employees don’t lead with their writing and communication skills.
Try an experiment with your writing for 30 days! Commit to practicing your writing every single day. It is a muscle and skill that you can build over time. Set aside 30 minutes each day and write something related to your line of work, be it an opinion you have or a draft of something you know you’ll need to say or write. This could mean you focus on sending a very important email to a top tier manager, or write a professional blog post that you add to your LinkedIn Profile. This not only helps your writing skills but will grow out your personal brand as a professional!
“The more you write, the easier it will become. Writing is not only a process of improving your skills as a professional writer, but also your skills as a creative person. When you look back a year later, you will be blown away by how much you have improved.” – Kirsten Trammell
The job hunt holds a great deal of writing. After your résumé and cover letter get you into the door, you’ll need well worded follow up notes to interviewers, and an entire email chain to even enter the interview process.
When I work with coaching clients on the job hunt, I help them improve their résumés and cover letters specifically for this reason. Writing isn’t going to be the one way ticket to a promotion, but if you don’t do it well, you have a lot to lose.
According to HR managers, 80% report that the quality of a thank-you note post-interview is a helpful determining factor in hiring a candidate. Keep it short, show your enthusiasm and of course, make sure there are no grammatical errors. If you are sending multiple emails, or you’re doing a lot of copy and pasting, make sure to have each one with the correct name.
While you work through your job hunt, find blogs and articles that are published in your career path, or perhaps even by the company to which you are applying. Take notice of their writing style, the niche vocabulary and the overall tone of their content. If that starts to feel exhausted, you can always pick up a self-development book.
Even better, read a book or a timely article and write a short review or a blog about the lessons it taught you. Start to do this and build your own library of spark notes to refer back to. Not only will this make you a better writer, but it improves comprehension and the ability to understand concepts more deeply.
When you consider that 66% of companies offer some form of remote work, with 16% fully remote, a great deal of communication has shifted from face-to-face to online. Even if you are not a remote employee, you likely rely heavily on email, text and instant messenger platforms to share professional information and connect.
In a matter of seconds, your short email or IM exchange can either charm or turn away a colleague, very well be by mistake. In fact, 80% of employees admit that miscommunication occurs in their daily work life. This is largely due to the absence of facial expressions, tone of voice and body language gestures. There is very little to help the reader understand how the other person is conveying even the simplest of messages.
When you learn how to improve your emotional writing skills, you not only will be able to maintain relationships with coworkers but also build them. And when the time comes, you can leverage your writing and communication skills to help persuade others to achieve their goals.
This might sound similar to Tip #1, but journaling has a whole different style of writing. Set time aside each day or week to turn inward and allow yourself to write free-flowing, don’t worry about grammar or sentence structure, allow yourself to pen to paper and write out how you feel about a person, situation or turn inward and reflect upon yourself.
Write from wherever your curiosity is taking you. This has been huge for me as a career coach, in helping others find their purpose at work. Far too often, we have thoughts living inside of us that we’re not aware of until they hit the page.
Embrace failure to become a better writer
Finally, just as you’ll have to handle criticism, you’ll also undoubtedly face rejection and failure. Whether you’re rejected by literary agents, fail to get a publishing deal, or have your stories, pitches, or poems rejected by literary publications, you must remember that failure is an inescapable and inevitable fact of life, and does not determine your worth as a writer.
Be assured that others fail, too, even if they only fail in private. One of our favorite reminders of how common failure is is the famous CV of failures published by Princeton professor Johannes Haushofer, where he lists every program, award, and position he was rejected from, as a reminder that everyone experiences failure. And if you need a writer-specific example of success despite failure, remember that Douglas Stuart’s novel Shuggie Bain, winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, was rejected 32 times before it received a publisher’s offer.
Continue reading
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Source:
https://www.semrush.com/blog/how-to-become-a-better-writer/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleystahl/2019/10/30/heres-how-to-become-a-better-writer/?sh=59de74e21736
https://blog.reedsy.com/how-to-become-a-better-writer/
Here’s How To Become A Better Writer
How to Become a Writer
How do you become a writer? The short answer is: anyone who writes is a writer. However, becoming a writer who’s serious about their professional career requires lots of work, and if you’re wondering how to become a professional writer, you’re ready to start the journey towards a productive and successful literary career.
You don’t need a degree to be a writer, nor do you need to be a certain age. Becoming a writer simply requires an admiration for—and a longing to create with—language. So, don’t worry about becoming a writer later in life or lacking a formal education. (That’s what Writers.com is here for!)
No one can teach you how to admire the written word, but the instructors at Writers.com are experts at turning longing into language. That’s why this article covers everything you need on how to become a writer. From the personal to the professional, let’s dive into everything writers need to build a successful literary career.
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People with strong writing skills are perceived as more reliable and trustworthy. Honing in this skillset with not only help you in your current role but will help you move up the corporate ladder. A study by Grammarly noted that those with fewer grammatical errors in their writing correlated to more promotions and higher salaries.
This doesn’t mean emails and reports without grammar errors are a quick shot to CEO, but it does create more credibility. When you come across composed and well written (or spoken), opportunities will be offered to you. In most jobs you will spend one third of your time writing and 73% of managers want employees who excel at this skill.
Think about it this way, if you received an email with poor sentence structure, and a bunch of typos, no matter how great this employee was, your thoughts may be more likely to point to them being unreliable, lazy or negligent.
Building this skillset will set you apart from others, especially in the worlds of technology and engineering, where many employees don’t lead with their writing and communication skills.
Try an experiment with your writing for 30 days! Commit to practicing your writing every single day. It is a muscle and skill that you can build over time. Set aside 30 minutes each day and write something related to your line of work, be it an opinion you have or a draft of something you know you’ll need to say or write. This could mean you focus on sending a very important email to a top tier manager, or write a professional blog post that you add to your LinkedIn Profile. This not only helps your writing skills but will grow out your personal brand as a professional!
“The more you write, the easier it will become. Writing is not only a process of improving your skills as a professional writer, but also your skills as a creative person. When you look back a year later, you will be blown away by how much you have improved.” – Kirsten Trammell
The job hunt holds a great deal of writing. After your résumé and cover letter get you into the door, you’ll need well worded follow up notes to interviewers, and an entire email chain to even enter the interview process.
When I work with coaching clients on the job hunt, I help them improve their résumés and cover letters specifically for this reason. Writing isn’t going to be the one way ticket to a promotion, but if you don’t do it well, you have a lot to lose.
According to HR managers, 80% report that the quality of a thank-you note post-interview is a helpful determining factor in hiring a candidate. Keep it short, show your enthusiasm and of course, make sure there are no grammatical errors. If you are sending multiple emails, or you’re doing a lot of copy and pasting, make sure to have each one with the correct name.
While you work through your job hunt, find blogs and articles that are published in your career path, or perhaps even by the company to which you are applying. Take notice of their writing style, the niche vocabulary and the overall tone of their content. If that starts to feel exhausted, you can always pick up a self-development book.
Even better, read a book or a timely article and write a short review or a blog about the lessons it taught you. Start to do this and build your own library of spark notes to refer back to. Not only will this make you a better writer, but it improves comprehension and the ability to understand concepts more deeply.
When you consider that 66% of companies offer some form of remote work, with 16% fully remote, a great deal of communication has shifted from face-to-face to online. Even if you are not a remote employee, you likely rely heavily on email, text and instant messenger platforms to share professional information and connect.
In a matter of seconds, your short email or IM exchange can either charm or turn away a colleague, very well be by mistake. In fact, 80% of employees admit that miscommunication occurs in their daily work life. This is largely due to the absence of facial expressions, tone of voice and body language gestures. There is very little to help the reader understand how the other person is conveying even the simplest of messages.
When you learn how to improve your emotional writing skills, you not only will be able to maintain relationships with coworkers but also build them. And when the time comes, you can leverage your writing and communication skills to help persuade others to achieve their goals.
This might sound similar to Tip #1, but journaling has a whole different style of writing. Set time aside each day or week to turn inward and allow yourself to write free-flowing, don’t worry about grammar or sentence structure, allow yourself to pen to paper and write out how you feel about a person, situation or turn inward and reflect upon yourself.
Write from wherever your curiosity is taking you. This has been huge for me as a career coach, in helping others find their purpose at work. Far too often, we have thoughts living inside of us that we’re not aware of until they hit the page.
Common questions about becoming a writer
Do you need a degree to be a writer?
Common degrees to pursue if you want to be a writer include English, journalism, and communications. It also isn’t uncommon for a professional writer to have a degree in another area and focus their career on writing in that niche. For example, you might have a degree in economics and decide you’d like to become a finance journalist.
Advanced degrees and beyond
Just like you don’t need a bachelor’s degree to become a writer, you don’t need an advanced degree—in most cases. As you search for writing jobs, you’ll likely come across listings for higher-level positions that do require advanced degrees. Usually, these listings are for candidates with highly specialized knowledge in one area, like a listing for a legal writer requiring that all applicants have a JD. But do you need an MFA in Creative Writing to publish your novel? Of course not!
Do I really need to write every day?
You’ve probably heard that if you want to be a professional writer, you need to write every day. What this advice really boils down to is practice makes perfect. You don’t necessarily have to write every single day, but carving out a block of time to focus on your writing regularly will help you become a stronger writer.
Where can I connect with other writers?
For a lot of writers, being part of a writing community is important. This is especially true if you go the freelance route—it’s always helpful to have peers you can bounce ideas off and ask for advice.
You can find lots of writing communities on social media as well as other places online. Some are free and open to everybody, while others are industry- and niche-specific and may require membership dues. You can also find in-person writing groups through platforms like meetup.com.
Resource:
https://writers.com/how-to-become-a-writer
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleystahl/2019/10/30/heres-how-to-become-a-better-writer/
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/how-to-be-a-writer/