How to become a good writer

As a blogger you must be a good writer, you must hone your writing skills and be good at what you do to stand out. Your writing skills should be good enough to compel people to read your content. When your writing skill is not good enough to capture new audience for your blog while retaining the ones you already have, then you need to improve on it.

Your writing skills could be the edge you have over your competitors, no matter how good you think you are there are still things you could learn to improve further.  So how can you become a good writer?

How to become a good writer:

Read from other/better writers:

The secret of learning has always been in reading, read from other bloggers who you know are better writers than you. Study and analyze their writing pattern or technique, learn the way they lay down their points, study how they preset their work, read their articles word to word and learn how they write and that way you can become a good writer.

Practice:

Learning how to write is not enough to make you a good writer, you must practice what you have leant to become a good writer. You must write to become a good writer; writing is an act and as such must be leant and practiced. When you write often, you become a better writer and over time you keep improving, I can authoritatively tell you now that I am a better writer than when I started blogging almost two years ago.

I am on my 560^th post on this blog and I can tell you I am definitely a better writer now than the first 100 posts I published here, I always try to revisit such posts to edit them. So you must devote quality time everyday to practice writing, all your writings must not be for publications, you could practice by writing journals offline, poems, notes etc. You can also practice by writing guest posts for publication on other blogs.

Plan your posts:

Before you commence writing, take some time to brainstorm and plan your post, arrange your points and ideas in the best way you want to preset them, then write your first copy as a draft, take some time to read through the draft, edit and correct your grammar/vocabularies. Reread your draft again and rewrite any portion you feel have not met the standard you want it to portray, do not edit while writing, edit only after you have finished writing. Look for errors especially in spellings and grammar as well as style, content, organization and coherence.

Note: I use Microsoft Word to write my articles before copying to my WordPress dashboard. Use a word processor to compose your posts, that way it can help you identify errors and suggest corrections.

Be well informed about the subject of your post:

Do not just jump into a topic you do not know much about and expect to come out with a great post, make your research first, gather your points and always try to add your own view to every post you write. Remember your audience is only reading the post to know what you think about it, so do not disappoint them, add your own personal flavor to your posts and you can only be good at it when you have researched the topic very well to know what it is all about. Then you can authoritatively add your own view without the fear of being criticized, I have raised some controversial topics on this blog in the past only because I know what I was talking about.  You can’t become a good writer if you are not informed about the subject you are writing about.

Make your points early in your posts:

Most visitors do not bother to read the whole of a post; some just skim while others read the first few paragraphs. So be sure to lay out your points early in a post. Arrange your posts in sections with clear subheadings.

From the image above you will notice that most visitors read the first few paragraphs and the skim through the rest of the content.  So use subheadings, bold texts etc where relevant to style your post. Break your posts in short paragraphs as most people easily get bored reading long paragraphs.

Get known with a writing technique:

Every writer or blogger should be unique from others from his writing technique, create and maintain a certain writing technique and get known for it. Don’t write like Sam today and sound like Sally tomorrow. Just recently someone asked me “how do you make every blog post seem simple and easy to understand”? And I replied by saying because I simply imagine being just a visitor reading the post.

To become a good writer you must observe all the above listed points and write consistently. It takes dedication, persistence, patience and courage to become a good writer, so if you have all these, time is all you need to become a good writer. Don’t be scared to try, you will get there soon.

Over to you:

Which tip did you find REALLY better to hone your writing skills? Or do you’ve any more tips to sharpen writing skills? Please share them below.