Writing can be a great hobby, and you really don’t have to be much good at it (and remember, ‘good’ is a subjective term in most cases anyway) to enjoy it. However, if you want to take that hobby further and turn writing into a career, either as a novelist, a blogger, or you just want to enhance your communication skills as a business owner, for example, then it’s wise to do what you can to get better – it’s a skill that needs patience, practice, and a bit of a plan to work towards, but it’s a skill that can be learned, just like any other, so if it’s what you want, you can certainly do it.
With that in mind, here are some tips to help you get better at writing – go through them all and you’ll soon see that it’s something you can definitely do, and it’s a good idea to get started sooner rather than later.
Read – A Lot
One of the best ways to improve your writing is to read a lot. Whenever you’ve got a spare moment, read a book, magazine, newspaper, blog, or anything else. Plus, make sure you read in all different styles and genres rather than just sticking to the one you’re used to or like the best; when you read more widely, you’ll get a much better idea of stories, structure, even vocabulary, and you can use all that knowledge to create something entirely unique that you’re proud of and that you know is good.
Although it might not be possible all the time, it’s also a great idea to do some active reading, which means taking notes and highlighting passages that you find particularly interesting or well-crafted. Plus, if there’s a word or phrase you don’t understand, don’t just read it and move on, research it and find out what it means; it might be something you can use in your own work at some point (although not copied directly because that’s plagiarism and it’s essentially cheating).
Play Scrabble
You can read a lot and that’s great, but it’s not the only way to enhance your vocabulary and to learn more about spelling and how words work; Scrabble can also be a wonderful way to do that, and because it’s a game you play with at least two people, you’ll be able to learn from the friends and family you’re playing with as well, getting more information than you would by yourself.
Scrabble is all about words, and you’ll find you learn a lot of new ones when you’re playing, plus you’ll be able to put any words you’ve just learned to the test (assuming you’ve got the letters, of course). Scrabble isn’t something everyone finds easy, of course, but the good news is you can use a word unscrambler to help you, and not only will you get better at Scrabble, but you’ll get better at writing too.
Write
As we said at the start, to be a good writer, you need to practice writing, and in the end, that’s the very best way to get better – the more you write, the more you’ll learn about words and sentence structure and the flow of a finished sentence. You’ll also get a better understanding of your own style and you’ll understand how to plot a story from beginning to end – everyone does it differently, so the more you try, the better you’ll get and you’ll work out what works for you.
Even if you don’t write fiction every day, you can still write well-crafted emails to make you stand out or add something to your journal, and it all counts – it’s all practice. Use all that writing time to enhance your skills, and you’ll become a fantastic writer.