Writing Better And Faster: 10 Effective Tips

Following on the success of our previous post on Read Better And Faster: 10 Simple Tips To Increase Efficiency, on a popular demand, we come up with a similar post on writing better and faster. I am sure we all have some interesting ideas in our mind, some very exciting ones we would love to share but it so happens that when we put it on paper, it somehow seems to miss out on what we intended to say. Ever felt that? I know I have and I also know that sometimes it has taken an enormous amount of time to write an essay on a very easy topic and a very short time to write one on a complex matter. How do we do it? It is not that we were a different person for each of these essays. Or were we?

Here are 10 effective tips on writing better and faster – whether you are a blogger or a student or someone who just loves to write their diary, I am sure you are going to find this useful.

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1) What is it that you want to say?

What is the purpose of the post? What is it supposed to say, what is the meaning you want to convey to the reader. Is it going to be a facts based article or the one with your opinion or better yet, an article with your opinion and facts to corroborate it? Most importantly you need to know what you are trying to say and clearly focus on that.

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2) Who is your reader?

Understanding your audience becomes extremely important whether you are doing a stage show or talking to someone or writing an answer. Who are you writing this for? Your narratives certainly vary depending on the type of person you are writing it for. For instance you cannot follow the same tone to a child and to a teacher, or a layperson and an educated crowd. You cannot use technical terms just cos you know them and expect a lay person to understand it. The lay person will be more than happy to move out of your article the moment he finds it hard to relate to. Relate to your reader, you don’t need to appear smart, you need to appear to know what you are talking about and the reader needs to know that you are making sense through it.

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3) The use of words

At the inception, I had a proclivity and penchant to show off my prowess in vocabulary! Don’t you just hate this previous sentence of mine? All I wanted to say is that when I started writing, I was very keen on the words I  wanted to sound smart and hence focused on words which are not normally used. But I forgot something very important and very basic – someone reading an article is never going to read it for the literary beauty of it unless its poetry, they are going to read it cos they are going to find something useful from it and nothing else!

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4) What solid points do you have?

If you are writing an answer or an essay or a blog post, your points are your most reliable friends. You can’t prove a point without a solid fact or you can’t try and sell an idea without having much support to it. Every piece of writing focuses on one large picture and the smaller ones add to this picture thus making it a comprehensive article.Each of these points play a very significant role in conveying the final idea of the article and you cannot take them for granted

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5) What solid points you have which do not make sense to this topic?

It is very hard to avoid the temptation of knowing something and not getting an opportunity to put it out. But for that you will always have a platform, a debate or a topic of discussion with your friend. Stick to what the question or the post is expecting out of you .We all move away from the topic at times cos of the urge to prove ourselves smart. But truth is – No one cares how smart you are. The article is not about you or me, it is about what difference it is going to make to the person reading it and the moment it doesn’t, there is no point in proving that you or I am a smarty pant!

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6) What is the main idea of your article?

Every article is a picture, there is a main point you are trying to make and there are these supportive ideas which sell your point. I agree that each of these supportive points play a very strong role in making the article credible but we do need to exercise caution and realize that the supportive ideas are there to support your main idea, the article should never be only of the supportive ideas, thus missing out on the main point you are trying to drive. That way you lose both your credibility and the interest of your audience.

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7) Value addition

Well there is a topic that you like and you are sure that you know something about it and you are actually very well versed with the topic and you are more than eager to make an article about it. But just for a moment give that one thought – what is the value addition you can make to that article. How is it going to be different from the thousands of other articles on the web? What is the value addition you are making to it. In other words, where is the you in that article which makes it so special?

I have heard people say that an article should be as neutral as possible. But I wonder if that is ever possible and if there is a neutral one, I am sure that I would really get bored to death reading it. I would love a conversation over an article for the sake of one.

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8) Let yourself go, be free..

We all have various perceptions as to how an article should be, whether it should have humor or if it should sound formal or sensitive and what not. Each of it certainly depends on your audience and what they expect out of you. But nevertheless there is one golden rule for any writer – BE FREE! Don’t worry about a lot of things when you are writing, just let yourself go. Any writing which makes you feel great is an effortless one where you feel that your hands and the mind are connected and words are just flowing out onto the paper. And that is exactly how you gain your speed.

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9) Write for the dustbin!

Well! None of us wants to write a crappy article, we all know that we have something interesting to say, the question is how we say it. Of course in the previous point, I advocated that we should let ourselves free and not have any boundaries. But honestly there is no fun without the boundaries. These boundaries are imposed by your topic or the question you are answering. The more you try and experiment with your styles the better you get at it and the better the readability is. The trick to any art is – “Write for the dustbin”. Forget the idea that it should be a perfect article. Write for the fun of it, make mistakes but make them quick. That is only beautiful way you can get to go ahead.

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10) Stop defining your style!

And stop imposing limitations on yourself, be free, pick up any style you want – funny, humorous, pedantic, engaging – you can be anything you want to be. The more you stick to a genre, the less flexible you get and the writing gets more monotonous and boring. Keep exploring yourself, adapt to the requirement of a topic and let the magic begin. Don’t hold yourself back in these definitions. There is a whole world out there to be conquered.

Those are our top 10 tips for effective writing and a slideshow below. Please feel free to download and share if you find it useful :)

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