how to improve your writing skills

No matter what you’re studying, competent writing skills are an essential part of your academic career. Good writing skills and grammar help you communicate more effectively with others, inspire creativity in all areas of your life, and help you learn thoroughly and efficiently. Plus, they’ll go a long way towards credibility and respectability throughout the rest of your professional life, too.

This is truer than it’s ever been in today’s world of digital classes, remote work, and long-distance communication. If you’re a student (or professional) looking for some easy tips on how to improve writing skills and grammar, look no further. We’ll give you some tricks, resources, and exercises to improve any writing skill to help you become a better writer. 

Why Do Writing Skills Matter?

It’s no secret that at SuperSummary, we love a well-written story. But even if your path isn’t one of a professional writer or storyteller, writing and grammar skills are essential in every classroom and workplace (as well as creative writing). Let’s look at a few of the ways well-developed skills help in academics and everyday life. 

Improve Communication 

Written communication is one of the most important life skills we have, whether that’s through telling a good story, penning a great essay, or crafting a clear-cut email. When we can’t communicate effectively, mistakes happen, and we lose out on valuable time trying to fix things. By practicing and improving a little bit every day, you’ll see your communication skills improve immensely in every area of your life. 

Enhance Creativity

Even if all you’re doing is typing out scientific reports, engaging with the written word will enhance your creativity in surprising ways. Writing stimulates the frontal cortex of your brain, the part associated with creativity. People who regularly engage this part of the brain are able to generate ideas and solve problems faster. Coming up with new ways to explain and communicate ideas also improves your imagination, as well as your ability to process ideas and invent your own. 

Boosts Credibility

Are spelling and grammar mistakes a fair way to assess the validity of an idea? Well, not necessarily, but poorly written work always raises some red flags for its readers. For instance, if a writer didn’t bother to take ten minutes editing their article, does that mean they cut corners in other places too? Should we trust that they can teach us about the effects of global warming when they can’t be bothered to learn the difference between a hyphen and an em-dash? Poor writing is difficult to trust and has a hugely negative effect on the credibility of the writer. By improving your skills, you’ll find that what you pen has a much more powerful impact. 

Tips for Improving Your Writing and Grammar

Here are some things to keep in mind as you approach your writing to make it stronger, more professional, and more confident. 

Read Everything

The best way to learn any language is through immersion, and well-structured writing is as much a language as any other. Every time we read, our brains absorb and learn from it. In addition to all the great health benefits of reading, it helps us see proper grammar usage in action and exposes us to a range of different structures and voices. 

Try to read voraciously in whatever area you want to write in—whether that’s fiction, academic papers, magazine articles, marketing copy, or poetry. Start building a mental catalog of what you like and don’t like about certain styles. The more you read, the more you’ll find yourself developing your own organic, confident writing style and diction (word choice). 

Research and Outline

You’ll find your approach improves a lot if you do your research beforehand. These are things like important names, dates, points you want to talk about, supporting arguments and evidence to support those points, etc. Try laying out all the details in a general shape of what your final essay is going to look like. That way you can see where ideas connect and where you might need more information to connect unrelated ideas. 

Once you have a wide understanding of what you’re going to write about, you can put together an outline, or a “road map,” for your piece. Some people like to use very detailed outlines with each paragraph broken into a beginning, middle, and end; others like to use broader outlines which lay out the major connection points that you want to address. There are many right ways to outline, and you can experiment to find the one that works best for you. 

Research and outlining helps in fiction, too. In this case the “research” is mostly within your own head. These are things like character studies, world-building, themes, and plot structure. If you develop a general picture of your entire story right from the beginning, you’ll find it easier to finish without getting stuck wondering what’s going to happen next. 

Familiarize Yourself with Grammatical Resources

It always helps to have a thorough understanding of basic grammar conventions. This can be a bit of a learning curve when you begin, but you’ll find that when you mindfully use grammar, it integrates into your pen naturally. 

Fortunately, we live in a world where a smorgasbord of information is at our fingertips. Both the internet and your local library will have a range of resources about the finesse of using proper grammar and punctuation. We’ve got lots of great articles to help in the SuperSummary Knowledge Library, and we’ve listed a few more of our favorite resources below. 

Favor Brevity

One of the most common mistakes that new writers (and even experienced writers) make is using too many words to present a simple idea. Be mindful of extraneous filler words like “sort of,” “almost,” “just about,” “basically”—words that stretch out the page without adding anything useful. 

Another type of filler that sneaks in is unnecessary adverbs, or words that enhance an action. An example would be, “she smiled happily”. In this instance, the adverb “happily” doesn’t add any new context to the verb (“smiled”). Sometimes a verb and an adverb can be combined into one stronger word. For example, “said quietly” can be said as “whispered,” “murmured,” “muttered,” etc., depending on the mood you want to convey. 

Try to choose strong, simple words and short sentences that allow you to convey your ideas clearly and succinctly. Trust your readers, and avoid the instinct to over-explain with long, drawn-out sentences. You’ll find that your work flows more smoothly and you communicate your ideas clearly. 

Use Active Voice

Did you hear the one about the bar who was walked into by a passive voice? In sentence structure, passive voice means allowing something to happen, rather than doing something. Very often this weakens your sentence and makes your idea seem vague and less reliable. For example, “The sun warmed the sidewalk” is written in active voice, and “the sidewalk was warmed by the sun” is written in passive voice. The second sentence lacks presence and urgency, making it less immediate to the reader. 

In an essay or academic work, the active voice creates a feeling of confidence and trust. By using an active voice, you’re putting yourself forward as an authority on the subject and telling the reader that you firmly stand behind everything you say. This is particularly important in persuasive essays and articles in which you try to convince the reader of a new idea or perspective. 

Take a Step Back Before Editing

Sometimes you won’t catch all these little details. That’s why it’s important to go back and edit your work after you finish. If you begin editing straightaway, however, you’ll often find it harder to catch weak places and mistakes. 

Always take a little time out between writing and editing. This way you come back with a clear head and fresh eyes. Ideally, try to set your work aside for a couple of days before you come back to edit; if this isn’t possible, at least set it down while you go for a walk, have some dinner, watch a show—whatever will get your mind off your project and bring you back to center. Then, take a fresh look at your work with these tips in mind and look for ways you can make your work even stronger. 

Practice!

Unfortunately, there’s no miracle elixir for great writing. The more you do it, the more these guidelines will make their way into your bones and become an assimilated language. You’ll also develop your own unique writer’s voice and gain a better understanding of what you enjoy, the sorts of sentences that feel most comfortable for you, and highlight your unique personality. With every sentence you pen, you’re one step closer to becoming the best writer you can be. 

3 Exercises to Improve Your Writing Skills

Now we have some ideas about why writing skills are so important and how we can begin improving them. Let’s put that into practice with a few practical exercises.  

Analyze Some Bad Writing

Most people can tell that a piece is badly written, even if they’re not entirely sure why-they just sense it. Find a page of poor writing (no judgment if you want to Google “Harry Potter fan fiction”) and take a hard look at what, specifically, makes it bad. 

Is it because a single sentence goes on for two thirds of the page? Is it a string of clunky adverbs? Does the dialogue feel unnatural? See if you can pick out the particular mechanics that aren’t working in the piece. Becoming aware of these things at a technical level will help you avoid them. 

Bonus round: Try rewriting it and see if you can turn it into something good.

Write Something Brilliant... Then Slice It in Half

Write 1,000 words. It doesn’t matter what it is at this point; you can type up a short story, a brief essay on prohibition-era speakeasies, or instructions on how to make your grandma’s famous blackberry jam cookies. Polish it until you’re satisfied you have a pretty solid 1,000 words. 

Then, without changing the information you’ve communicated in your piece, edit it down to 500 words. 

Look for ways to cut away anything that’s not completely necessary for getting the important points across. Look for superfluous modifying words, unnecessary adjectives, indulgent turns of phrase, until you’ve told exactly the same story in half as many words. This isn’t to say that everything you pen should always be told as minimally as humanly possible, but this exercise will give you a sense of what is essential and what is extraneous. 

Write Something Three Ways

For this exercise you can use the same 1,000 words as above or something new. Take your subject and write about it in three different voices. 

For example, your first piece might be something colloquial, intimate, and familiar. (“Hey girl, I’m going to take you down into the Chicago underbelly and the fast-and-loose jazz clubs of the roaring ‘20s.”) The second might be more formal and academic. (“‘Prohibition’ refers to the time period between 1920 and 1933 in which the United States government banned the production, importation, and sale of alcoholic beverages.”) The third might be simple and straightforward, as though explaining your topic to a child. (“Back in the 1920s, the American government decided it was illegal for anyone to have alcohol. This meant that if someone wanted to drink something alcoholic, they had to do it in secret.”)

You can also do this exercise by imitating the writing styles of other writers whose work you enjoy. By approaching the same subject with different word choices, you can get a sense of what feels most natural to you, as well as how to adjust the way you communicate your ideas to different audiences. 

4 Resources to Keep Improving

Improving your writing and grammar is a lifelong journey. We’ve given you some great places to start, but you’ll want to keep learning and growing every day. Here are a few of our favorite resources to continue improving your writing skills. 

Grammarly Blog

Grammarly has a huge library of grammar resources to look through. It’s a great place to look when you have an ultra-specific grammar question, like, “Why is there a hyphen in ‘drawn-out’ but not in ‘poorly written’?” Or, “when do I use hyphens when typing out numbers? For that matter, when do I write out numbers instead of using actual numerals?” Or, “What is an Oxford comma? Does anybody even know?” The answer is yes, Grammarly knows, and they’ve got your back. (Grammar Girl is another in-house favorite!)

Scribophile

If you’re a fiction writer, check out the Scribophile Writing Academy, a library of free articles for emerging storytellers. They cover things like character development, plot structure, literary devices, and story archetypes to take your novel, short story, or poetry to the next level. Plus, you can make a free account to join their online community and receive peer feedback on your work. 

Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin 

Remember when we read books instead of looking everything up on the internet? Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft is one of the best books we’ve seen on the mechanics of writing and storytelling. It’s not a huge tome (141 pages in the 2015 paperback rerelease), but it covers useful techniques like point of view, sentence structure, and verb tense, along with exercises to put the techniques into practice. 

On Writing by Stephen King

The master storyteller shares his insights into the art of writing in his 2000 memoir, On Writing. (Check out the SuperSummary study guide). King shares his thoughts on the necessary tools of the trade as well as details of his own practice, all of which are applicable to writers at all stages and levels. 

Level Up Your Writing and Grammar Skills

Becoming the best writer you can be isn’t an overnight deal. It takes work, practice, and careful consideration for your own wordsmithing and that of others. Once you begin to improve your skills, however, you’ll find that the entire world opens up to you. You’ll communicate ideas more clearly, speak more confidently, and create brand new ideas to share with the world.