Writing is the ultimate skill you should learn in 2023 if you haven’t already.
There are tons of great writers that we talk about at Career Hackers. One such writer is Tim Denning. He is a successful daily writer for 9 years who mostly writes about personal development and entrepreneurship. But the story wasn’t always the same.
Early on in his career when he started writing for an unknown website called Addicted2Success, he didn’t think he’d survive this world for long. He failed a bunch of times and had massive lows. Now he is a well-known writer with 500M+ views on his content.
But why am I telling you this?
My only motive for telling you Tim’s story was to reassure you that successful writers are not born with those skills. It takes time, multiple failures, and above all, practice.
Now, let’s cut to the chase.
Here are 5 guaranteed tips for improving your writing online in 2023 –
#1: Think before you write
This may look obvious but to your surprise, most people skip this. People sit down to write without actually knowing what they want to say.
And what I am talking about is the key message you want to communicate through your writing and not just the facts and figures. Here’s the better process for you to follow-
- Collect all the information
- Read and think about what it means to you
- Search for bits of literature that relate to the ideas
- Write
This will make your writing more meaningful and will express the idea you want to communicate better. Plus point is that writing it will be faster without compromising on the quality.
#2: Format is the key
You can ignore a block of text even if it’s full of valuable information. It’s resistance to mind.
People don’t read, they scan.
When you examine the best writings online, you will notice a pattern. The format is easy to read, isn’t resisting, is visually appealing, and is scannable.
- Use bullet points
- Break up text with line breaks
- Avoid long sentences
- Use images to make it more interactive
- Use more full stops than commas
#3: Write a lot
The best advice to master the art of writing and communicating your ideas better is to make writing a habit and become consistent with it. Write daily. Write a lot. Build trust. And have patience.
The volume of your work is greater than the quality of your work. And as Tim says, “Your writing is good enough. It will become great the more you publish.” Quality will increase gradually. Show up every day to build trust and it will compound to build an audience.
#4: Make your writing sound human:
That’s something school or academic writing does to us. We learn to write everything formally using business phrases and honestly, that’s not how human interacts. It sounds empty, meaningless, and not interesting.
Write how you talk, and use words that make it more human-like. Don’t use a word that you won’t use in speech. Write easy-to-read paragraphs because we’re not trying to look smart for a professor of nothing. This is what makes people take action after reading your words because they feel connected. And humans connect to humans.
Unprofessional equals relatable.
#5: Make your words sing
And by that, I mean, try to make your words rhyme. Sentences that create a rhythm.
Even when you write a tweet, try to think about the rhythm of sentences. It makes sentences far more interesting and memorable. Of course, this type of process is uncomfortable, particularly because it will run counter to your existing habits. Be strict with yourself. But we don’t want to think too much about the next thing that we are going to write. Pause to gather your thoughts- but no more than a few seconds.
To summarise, don’t overthink too much before writing and while publishing. Add lots of your personality to your writing. The more you write, the more you publish, and the more your chances are to succeed. We are all learning, don’t stress yourself too much.
Take it one step at a time and focus on learning. You’ll do fine.
“You can’t replace reading with other sources of information like videos, because you need to read in order to write well, and you need to write in order to think well ”
— Paul Graham
