Article Marketing Tips 7 Tips That Will Improve Your Writing

By Author: Stephen Simmons
Total Articles: 38
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Maybe you're a seasoned article writer, or maybe you've just started writing free reprint articles and you're not exactly sure what you're doing. Did you know that both veterans and newbies struggle from time to time during the writing process and in creating articles that are high quality?
No matter how long you've been writing, you never stop learning. Even professional writers still strive to improve their technique and become better writers. Here are 7 tips that writers of any skill level can do to improve their writing:
1 - Write on a daily basis.
Writing is a bit like exercising-- if you only put on your jogging shoes and go for a run once a month, then every time you do it you're going to struggle. Your body simply has not done that activity enough to get used to it.
However, if you jog several times a week, then your muscles get accustomed to the exercise and it's not such a big deal to run.
Writing works in a similar way--if you only sit down to write a couple times a month, then you'll have a much harder time than if you carved out a little time each day to write. Twenty or thirty minutes ...
... is a good amount of time to start with.
2 - Get a role model.
If you have a particular writer that you admire, you can intuitively learn from him or her by simply typing a few pages of that person's work as your warm up, prior to you starting your own writing.
3 - Review your final draft carefully.
Most word processing tools come with a spelling checker and a grammar checker, but nothing beats an actual human reviewing the final draft. Spelling and grammar checkers will oftentimes miss things, so as obvious as this advice sounds, you really do need to review your article for errors after you've finished writing it.
4 - Allow a time of separation from your article before trying to proofread it.
It is extremely hard to go straight from writing an article to proofreading it. During the writing process, you just get too used to reading your article, which makes it very difficult to notice obvious errors. The solution is to take a break after finishing your final draft. Let enough time pass so that the article can become less familiar to you. Usually a period of 24 hours is enough time to get that distance. Then, when you review your article it will be like you're looking at it for the first time.
5 - Have realistic expectations of how many articles you can write in a certain time span.
It's good to have a goal of creating a certain number of articles each month, but it's important not to put too much pressure on creating those articles in a short period of time. It's not realistic to sit down at your computer and say, "I'll write 8 articles today." Writing takes time, and if you try to take on such a feat, you will quickly become discouraged.
Instead, you can anticipate that it will take you a good bit of time to write each article to completion. If you adopt the tip of writing on a daily basis, you'll be working steadily toward your article goal each business day, which is a lot easier than trying to crank out a certain number of articles in a short period of time.
6 - Think about what the specific goal is for each article--what are you trying to accomplish?
You'll think of a topic for each article, but don't stop there. Take a few moments before you begin writing to ask yourself what you actually want to accomplish with this article that you're about to write. It may seem like an obvious question--if you're writing an article about how to change a car tire, then you may think that teaching that topic is what you want to accomplish with the article.
I challenge you to think a little deeper. Is it that you want to show your readers that they really are capable of doing things that they might not have thought they could? Maybe you want to empower your readers with a sense of self-accomplishment.
Thinking about what you want to accomplish with the article will help with the overall tone of the piece, and the article will be easier to write.
7 - Use the speech tool in MS Word when editing.
Did you know that the version of MS Word that you're using may include a speech tool, where you can ask the program to read your article back to you? Hearing an unfamiliar voice reading your article to you can help you detect grammar issues.
Your writing will get better the more you do it, but you don't need to wait until you have years of experience to dramatically improve your writing quality. Simply by following the 7 tips in this article, you can improve your writing and editing skills right away. Which of these tips will you use when writing your next article?

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