Whether you’re working on a book or your next blog post, writing is a practice. It’s not about being good or bad—it’s about constantly seeking ways to improve, no matter where you are with your skills. Every time you write, it gets a little easier. But at the same time, diligent writers collect skills and tricks they can use to make their writing stronger and more compelling.

Here are five of the simplest and most powerful writing tips you can add to your collection.

1. Make it Reader Friendly
Writing is about making a connection, and you have to communicate with your readers. That means positioning your message in a way that is most meaningful and compelling to your readers—not to you or your friend or anyone else. How do your readers need to hear what you have to say? What’s going to strike their favorite chords? Even if you are not the world’s greatest writer, making your writing reader friendly will greatly improve the effectiveness and readability of your work.

2. Use Active Verbs
One of the biggest mistakes people make when writing is using the passive voice, or passive verbs. This complicates their sentences and makes them hard to understand, which is definitely not reader friendly. Look for ways to rewrite sentences that use passive to-be verbs, like “is,” “was,” and “were.” They can’t always be reworked, but oftentimes they should be. Active verbs will make your writing more engaging and clear.

3. Be Concise
Saying what you mean in as few words as possible is another key to improving your writing. After you get your message down, go through your writing and take out every unnecessary word. Kill your darlings, in other words. If a word, sentence, or phrase does not serve to illustrate your point, take it out or replace it with words that work.

4. Write Toward Your Goal
If you want your writing to have meaning, you need to have a clear goal or message for what you write. Always decide exactly what you want to accomplish with your writing and make sure every word helps reach this goal. Be direct; tell your readers what you want them to do. If readers have to guess, they will either stop reading or miss your point.

5. Break Up Big Projects
If you have a particularly large writing project, break it up into smaller segments. For example, don’t sit down and say to yourself, “I’m going to work on a chapter of my book on management.” Instead, be more specific and tell yourself, “I’m going to write an introduction to chapter three.” Working on a smaller scale will keep you motivated, prevent you from getting lost, and give you a sense of accomplishment every time you finish a part of the project. And it will prevent you from feeling discouraged because the entire project is not complete yet.

Improve Your Writing Today
No writer ever gets to the point where they can stop improving their craft. And even if you think you’re a good writer, you should always look for new tools to add to your writing tool box. Successful writing depends on many factors, including organization, simplicity, and conciseness. If you follow these five tips, your writing will improve and your message will be clear in whatever you write, every time you write.

Comments? When was the last time you made an effort to improve your writing skills? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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We are a quirky bunch—that’s for sure. Every writer has different habits, unique strengths, and mistakes they always make in their work. For example, some can’t get started without a cup of coffee. Some always forget when to use “that” or “which.” And in some cases, these quirks severely limit a writer’s success.

Knowing your own habits, flaws, mistakes, and strengths can help you compensate for your limitations, and work with your own natural strengths and rhythms. In other words, knowing yourself as a writer can make you a better writer and help you achieve your goals. To get to know your writer-self a little better, consider the following three areas of your work.

1. Your Mistakes
Knowing the issues that trip you up can help you eliminate the problem before it becomes a problem. If you default to the passive voice, and you know this is a problem for you, then you can specifically look for these issues when you self-edit your work. To determine the mistakes you make all the time, ask a writer-friend for objective feedback on your grammar, punctuation, and style; or have your work professionally copyedited and look for trends in the editor’s comments. Then you’ll know what to fix before you submit your work for publication.

2. Your Strengths
Like knowing your weaknesses, knowing your strengths can help you achieve your writing goals—and make writing easier. If you can write essays with your eyes closed, or you can plot a murder mystery in minutes, then you should be capitalizing on those strengths. When you know what type of work you like to do the best, then you will naturally gravitate towards those projects and specialize in a way that sets you apart from other writers. This is why it never hurts to experiment with different genres and forms—you may find you have a knack for writing short stories or plays or feature articles.

3. Your Work Habits
Some writers work best early in the morning and others like waiting until everyone else in the household has gone to sleep before they sit down to write. Knowing and understanding your rhythms can help you plan your writing time around your most productive and creative hours of the day. To figure out when you write best, pay attention for a few days to when you feel most inspired, when the words come the easiest, and when you feel like writing. Every writer is different, although none should hesitate to plan their day around their writing.

Knowing Yourself
Getting to know yourself as a writer—the good and the bad—can make you a better, smarter, and more successful writer. Knowing the mistakes you make over and over again lets you know what to look for when you revise. Knowing your strengths helps you make them stand out; and understanding your work habits helps you increase productivity. When you use these tips for getting to know you as a writer, your work will get better and you’ll achieve your writing goals.

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Melinda Copp helps aspiring self-help, business, and nonfiction authors get their books done, so they establish expertise, achieve their goals, and share their message in a powerful way. Get a free copy of her Write Your Book Quick-Start Mini E-course when you sign up for her weekly e-zine.

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If you’re writing a book, eventually you need to get feedback on your writing skills, the material itself, and whether or not your goals were accomplished in the manuscript. After all, the goal of writing a book is to communicate with readers, and if no one has read your book at press time, you’ll never know whether your message is perceived the way you intend it to be perceived. You can read it yourself over and over again, but you won’t be able to get a sense of how others interpret your book without letting someone else read it.

Luckily, lots of different resources are available for getting feedback on your book, and some of them are free. After you’ve read it a few times yourself, consider the following places where you can look for help if you need someone to bounce ideas off of, someone to proofread your work, or someone to give you some advice on the organization and actual writing of your book.

Friends and Family—Your Readily Available Test Audience

Friends and family are a great resource when you need some book writing help. It doesn’t matter if none of your friends or family are professional writers or editors, they can still help and support you while you are writing your book. In fact, friends and family make a great test audience for your book. If you can have friends and family read your book, and in doing so gain a clear understanding of what you were trying to convey, then you know that your ultimate goal was accomplished.

Using friends and family members as a test audience is a great way to get book writing help. However, be careful when asking your friends and family for book writing help, because they love you they might not be as objective as they need to be when it comes to your book. Make sure that your friends and family can be tough on the book if they need to be. Let them know that you really want their objective opinions, and ask specific questions about aspects of your manuscript that you’re not sure about.

Colleagues—Those Who’ve Been There, and Done That

Another resource that you can use to get feedback on your book is your colleagues.  Since your colleagues know your industry or area of business, they can be a great help when it comes to making sure that the information in your book is accurate and precise.  Your colleagues also may have written books themselves, so they can probably give some good advice on the organization and marketing of your book. They might even be willing to help you market the book when it’s published.

An Editor—A Professional with Experience in the Publishing Industry

Although hiring an editor to look at your manuscript cost money, the investment will be well worth it in the end. An editor can not only eliminate style, grammar, and punctuation inconsistencies and errors, but they can also provide feedback on where your material needs trimmed or expanded to make your book as cohesive and successful as possible. The best time to hire an editor is after you’ve done everything you can to improve your manuscript on your own and after you’ve enlisted your friends, family, and colleagues to provide their insights.

Getting Feedback on Your Book

To ensure your book is successful, you need a few test readers to provide their feedback on your manuscript before you go to print. Start with your friends and family, and then look to your colleagues for their insight. And when you’ve done everything you can to make your book your best work, hire an editor to polish it off and get it ready for press. When you use these strategies for getting feedback on your manuscript, you can be sure your book will communicate your ideas and insights with clarity and success.

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About the Author: Melinda Copp helps self-employed professionals, coaches, consultants, and speakers write and publish to establish expertise, attract a following of ideal readers and clients, and make more money. Get a free copy of her Write Your Book Quick-Start Mini E-course when you sign up for her weekly e-zine.

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Whether you’re working on a narrative or instructional manuscript, self-editing skills are important to your success as a writer. However, many writers don’t know where to start when it comes to looking at their own writing objectively. They can easily skim through for grammar and punctuation errors, but when it comes to the effectiveness of the content and images they create on the page, their own perceptions can be very different from what a reader reads.

Every writer needs an editor, but all writers can use the following ten self-editing questions to think critically and objectively about their own work.

1. Are your chapter titles effective and clear? For instructional works, they should tell readers what’s coming up in the chapter. For creative works, chapter titles can be more creative in their purpose. Still, look at them all to determine how they work together and whether or not they help establish the theme for your narrative.

2. Do your opening sentences hook your readers? This is critical for both narrative and instructional works—grab your readers right away and don’t let them go.

3. Do your introduction paragraphs effectively introduce the content contained in that chapter? For creative works, the first paragraph should set the tone for what’s coming.

4. Are your subheads effective and clear? This obviously applies primarily to how-to nonfiction and instructional works, but creative writers should look at what each chapter title reveals about the chapter it introduces.

5. Do your chapter titles and/or subheads collectively work together to reinforce the theme and goals of the book as a whole?

6. Where do you need more subheads to make the information more manageable for your readers? Again, subheads are primarily for instructional works, but creative writers should look at how their narrative flows and scenes change in each chapter to find where readers may potentially feel lost.

7. Are the examples you use effective in illustrating your points, and reinforcing the theme? For creative writers, does each scene move the narrative forward?

8. Are your main points clear throughout your chapters? For creative writers, is your theme and narrative line clear throughout each chapter?

9. Is the information, or scenes, within each chapter presented to the reader in a logical way?

10. Does each chapter close in such a way that leaves your readers anxious for what comes next? In other words, don’t let them put your book down for long!

Just like every writer needs an editor, every writer needs to learn how to think about their own work objectively—they need to see their own words as a reader will see them. This can be challenging, but it’s definitely not impossible. When you use these ten self-editing questions, you’ll be able to better see the challenges and inconsistencies in your own writing, and your writing project—whether it’s the great American novel or the next bestselling how-to book—will be much better   as a result.

Comments? How do you edit your own work?

About the Author: Melinda Copp helps self-employed professionals, coaches, consultants, and speakers write and publish to establish expertise, attract a following of ideal readers and clients, and make more money. Get a free copy of her Write Your Book Quick-Start Mini E-course when you sign up for her weekly e-zine.

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Okay, you’re finished with your first draft. Congratulations—that in itself is a big accomplishment. However, don’t celebrate for too long because all first drafts need a good clean-up before they’re ready for the reading world.

When it comes to self-editing, writers often struggle for a number of reasons—they can’t view their writing objectively, they have no idea what to look for, and they become frustrated when the work isn’t perfect, just to name a few. The key to self-editing is being able to shift from the creative, writing mindset to the analytical editor mindset, which takes practice. But here are five tips for getting you started.

1. Give Yourself Some Space

Editing isn’t always easy work, and most people are best at it after taking time away from the project. Even just a few days will give you new perspective and a better idea of what needs to be done. Therefore, the first step in the editing process is to take time off. Set your draft aside and don’t even think about it for at least twenty-four hours.

2. Read in a Different Format

When most of us write, we do it on the computer—that means the only way we see our words is on the screen. Printing the draft out and reading the hardcopy will help your brain shift gears. You can move away from your writing space (computer desk, kitchen table, or where ever you write) and curl up on the couch with your red pen and read with completely different intentions in mind.

3. Use a Style Guide

Self-editing requires you to look at the details as well as the big picture. For the details, the best way to avoid making mistakes and creating inconsistencies is to use a style guide, such as The Chicago Manual of Style (which is most often used by book publishers and magazines) or The Associated Press Stylebook (the newspaper world standard). These guides make grammar, punctuation, and style decisions easy for writers, especially if your grammar is a little rusty. When you’re not sure if you need a comma, just look it up.

4. Read Your Draft Out Loud

Your words may look right on the page—especially to you, the writer. But reading your work out loud will let you know if your words sound right, too. Reading aloud will help you hear overused phrases, awkward sentence constructions, and clumsy phrases that you may not be able to catch when you look at them on the page.

5. Balance the Whole

While you’re looking at the details of your writing—the grammar, punctuation, wording, etc.—you also need to be conscious of the draft as a whole. One of the easiest ways to get a sense of where your draft may be unbalanced is to look at the piece visually. If you’re writing an article, make sure your subsections are all about the same length, and if you’re writing a book, look at the sizes of your chapters. Of course, these don’t always have to be the same length, but when one chapter or subsection stands out because it’s either much shorter or longer than all the others, make sure the material warrants the difference and it wasn’t a subconscious mistake.

Cleaning Your Prose

Writing and editing are two very different processes, and moving from one task to another requires a shift in your mindset. When you use these tips for getting into the editing mood, you’ll be on your way to your final draft in no time!

About the Author: Melinda Copp helps self-employed professionals, coaches, consultants, and speakers write and publish to establish expertise, attract a following of ideal readers and clients, and make more money. Get a free copy of her Write Your Book Quick-Start Mini E-course when you sign up for her weekly e-zine.

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Writing and editing are two different processes. Writing requires creativity; editing requires analysis. The writing process should be free and experimental; the editing process should be systematic and critical.

Because of these differences, making a conscious shift in your thinking will make the self-editing process easier and more effective, and one of the best ways to accomplish this is taking time away from the project. For example, I used to write in the morning and then edit in the afternoon. Separating my time like this, and doing so day after day, made shifting from writer to editor easier and more natural.

Even just a few hours will give you new perspective and a better idea of what needs to be done. Therefore, the first step in the editing process is to take a break. Set your manuscript aside and don’t look at it for a few hours, days, even a week if it’s a long work, like a book or e-book.

Time away from the project will allow you to come back to it with a clear head and ready to work. But that doesn’t mean you should forget about your project altogether. During your time off, you should think about your goals. Ask yourself: What do I hope to accomplish with this particular writing project? What main themes do I want to use to communicate my information? How do I want to come across to my readers? What are the main points I want my readers to learn and understand?

Think about all these questions, and jot down some notes that describe your vision. Think about how your goals and vision have changed since you your draft. What new ideas did you have? How will this change your manuscript content and organization? Do your goals add depth to the manuscript? Taking time to revisit your vision now, before going back in and revising your draft, will give you direction during the editing process.

When you’re ready to come back to your work with fresh eyes, use these tips to help you shift from the writer to editor mindset.

1.    Make editing appointments. Just like you schedule your writing time on your calendar, schedule your editing time. Make this a regular part of your day, or week—for example, maybe you write Monday through Thursday, and edit on Friday.

2.    Ritualize both activities in different ways. For example, maybe you write at your desk every morning with your coffee and your lucky slippers. Well, that’s a writing ritual—little ways you’ve made the activity special and routine. Why not do the same for editing? You could edit in the afternoons while sitting on your patio and drinking iced tea.

3.    Edit on a hard copy. Print out your draft and pull out your red pen! Working in a different format will help your mind shift gears because the actual work you’re doing will “feel” different.

Comments? How do you edit your own work?

About the Author: Melinda Copp helps self-employed professionals, coaches, consultants, and speakers write and publish to establish expertise, attract a following of ideal readers and clients, and make more money. Sign up for her weekly writing and marketing e-zine, and get a free report on writing to grow richer!

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