
Which reader problem will your article help solve? Or which aim will you help achieve? Good content has one clear purpose-to inspire a reader to implement your advice. Who are you writing for? Good writers have a pathological interest in their readers and understand their dreams, fears, and secret wishes.
Just like a good dinner party needs some planning, good writing starts with thinking, too: Who’s coming for dinner? What do they like to eat? You create a meal plan, get your groceries, and decide in what order to cook the dishes, so each dish will be ready in time. Think before you writeīefore you cook a meal, you need a plan of action. In pretty much any area of human endeavor, people have a tremendous capacity to improve their performance, as long as they train in the right way.
Get out of your comfort zone-don’t use the examples to put yourself down instead, challenge yourself to get better and enjoy the learning experience- nurture a growth mindset.Īs Anders Ericsson, author of Peak: How All of Us Can Achieve Extraordinary Things, suggests:. Practice a specific writing technique, and compare your writing to the examples in your swipe file, so you can see how to improve further. Or if you’d like to improve word choice, see how Ray Bradbury uses strong verbs in Zen in the Art of Writing gather all your favorite examples in a swipe file-a collection of writing examples to learn from. If you’d like to write with more simplicity, study Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Read the work of other writers to understand how they apply writing techniques. What exactly do you want to improve? For instance, you may want to focus on choosing the right words or writing simpler sentences. Establish your main writing weaknesses. These principles of deliberate practice help accelerate your learning: Learning to write better can feel like an overwhelming task.īut just like a chef learns how to fry an egg and how to fillet a fish-and just like a violinist practices a difficult passage over and over again-writers can practice specific writing techniques to improve their skills. Understand the principles of deliberate practice Want to improve your business writing skills?Ĭlick here to join the 16-Part Snackable Writing Course and learn how to write better marketing copy (it’s free!) Step I.