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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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Great read! Useful and honest points …I had to nod my head for almost every points…thank you!
Thank you Uma Maheshwari :). I am really happy to know that it helped :)
Very nice! I should emphasize about point 3 here. I had same doubt that my vocabulary should be rich in content. I have read many people comments, articles on various blogs, websites where I had to literally open the dictionary to understand what they are trying to convey. :) I was feeling really low. Overall it is really helpful article to me. And thank you for coming to us with this article as requested the other day. Bookmarked it. thank you @Vinaymn:disqus
Thank you my friend. I was very much looking forward to your thoughts on it and now I really feel that I have done justice to the post. So happy to see this comment :).
He he, yeah, I have done it too earlier and then I realized that what I was trying to convey was more important than the words and that made more sense and it was easier to relate to more people with simpler words than the complicated ones. Maybe that is why they call – simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
Thanks so much mate. I am really happy to be of help. Hope to keep coming up with more such interesting ones :)
Thank you Kavita. I am very happy that you liked it. I was feeling bad that I took such a long time to write a post on this. And now I am really glad to read this comment and know how much you appreciate it. Thank you for such lovely words, I am sure you are gonna be great.
Ha ha, well I am on the journey too, but I always happy to help.
Happy Diwali :)
It’s so very well written Vinay…much appreciated. I too, at the beginning, used to behave as you’ve stated in no.3 :-P…but later I had the same realization. :-)..
Thank you Maniparna :). I had been meaning to write this from a long time. Happy that you liked it and really happy to see such a lovely response to the post :)..
I was notorious in college for the overuse of words and people used to make fun of me for that. It took almost two years for me to realize that :D.. But better late than never right? ;)
Awesome post Vinay :) I am really excited to read it :) Super like all your tips and post :)
Thank you Alok :). I loved this post too. This is certainly my favourite one of the month :)
It is very important to assemble your thoughts before you gonna pen down else it will eat plenty of time to finish one writeup. I completely agree with all the pointers especially the last one – “stop defining your style”. It is so true. One should definitely read it. Lovely article Indeed. “Great post Vinay…. :)
Thank you Priyashi :). Happy Diwali!
I initially used to think I had a style, then I realized that more than defining me it was standing the way of new posts and the excitement of trying something new. I am really glad to have gotten over that habit :)
Very Interesting! :-)
Thank you Ashwini :)
Thank you. Nice tips. Problem is sometimes mind cannot figure out what it wants to say.
Thank you Abhijit :). Happy Diwali!
I agree, I have faced that. Most times I dont even know what I am going to write about but when the article starts, I realize that maybe there are one or two points which I want to write on and realize further that these points add up finally painting a picture which makes the process so exciting :)