Top Secrets Revealed: How To Become A Better Writer

If you already consider yourself a better writer, don't quit reading. The secrets we are about to unleash can make you write like an angel. You could become one of the best writers available and everyone's favorite.

This time it is not what a writer should do. We are going to look at the thing we consistently do that has driven out the reader from flipping the pages of the article. Does it have something to do with the way you convince your readers? Precisely, it has to do with it. Trying to fill what we are writing, with legalistic and very technical words, exposes us to some problems. Fortunately though, there is a solution for that.

Highly technical and legalistic words are for lawyers. We all recognize them, don't we? We see them in contracts, copyright notices, lease agreements and the most common statements we see in Affidavits. I can't remember an instance where my eyes were not strained while I read them. Worst of all, I don't remember understanding them at once. I had to re-read them twice or even many times to get cleared of what it says. Of course, we do not want our readers to experience the same. We do not have to create sentences and paragraphs of ever-increasing complexity and abstraction. Fussy sounding expressions of academic and technical terms and a number of archaic sentence constructions will take some moments for the reader to figure out what on earth is he or she is reading about. You will be lucky if the audience decides to read through. My experience has it that I close everything and move on to another easy to understand write-up! I move on to find a writing that is not padded with modifiers, prepositional phrases, qualifiers, and so forth and so on. This brings us to the rules; rules to avoid when writing the body of the article:

Rule No. 1 - Avoid using words that you often see in a lawyer's jargon. I know you're doing it to look very convincing. These words are: "true and correct", "aforementioned", " hereinafter", "said", "null and void" and the list continues... Using these words does not in any way add meaning to your article. We have to use simple and familiar words while writing. We can communicate great things even if we make use of simple words.

Rule No. 2 - Avoid making very long sentences by writing unnecessary words. If you are trying to impress your editor by rambling on from page to page, then you are mistaken. You are, instead, trying to make your editor figure out where to break and breath, or even vomit the words unacceptable to his system. It is easier to use that period (.) after expressing one thought than hanging around for more descriptions and other word beautifier! I believe in what David A. Fryxell of the Writer's Digest when he said, "Let the facts, not your thesaurus, do the work." According to him, overloading sentences with adjectives, will cause the writing mechanisms go nowhere.

We know how modifiers and phrases have helped us during the high school days, when we were padding our homework with all the words we could muster and to comply with the least word needed before submission. It does not work like this anymore, now that we are striving to become better writers. Using a lot of these unnecessary qualifiers can bring us to a great casualty as authors and writers, in bringing clarity to our audience.

Rule No. 3 - Avoid writing in a very formal tone. That would seem like you are speaking in front of a graduation ceremony or defending a thesis proposal in front of your academic panels. Write as if you are talking to a friend, where conversation about the topic is free-flowing and very casual.

Rule No. 4 - Avoid ending your last sentence using a weak note. Nothing happens to what you want to emphasize to the readers if you just let it end casually. Good writers placed their prominent words at the last sentence. Remember, you are to encourage the readers to take a positive action in your last sentences, and you are doing this for the reader to remember what to do until she finishes reading the last words in your article.

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