Improving your writing
If you feel a bit unsure about spelling and grammar, what should you do? That depends. Do you care? Do you want to improve your writing? If you do, there’s a lot you can do.
What’s most important is to realize there’s a problem and be prepared to change.
1. Use the spellcheck function in your word processing program.
2. Re-read your text a couple of times. Just posting your work somewhere without editing doesn’t give a good impression at all.
3. Ask a friend to read what you’ve written. Two people can find more mistakes than one. This is something very simple. If you don’t have a friend who is better at this than you are, ask a teacher, parent or other relative, or ask someone online to be your beta reader.
4. You can read a book (or books) about spelling and/or grammar. Do your homework. This doesn’t have to be boring. It’s up to you to decide how much you can take in at a time. No teacher is going to grade you. You’re the one who says when you’ve had enough.
5. Perhaps you can take a creative writing course or a course of English, if you want the largest possible audience (of course all this depends on your nationality/ethnic group). If you’re a native English speaker there might still be courses about your own language. Check it out. This might be the most strenuous thing you can do to improve your writing, but also the most useful except for the following hint.
6. Read. As many books as possible. Fiction, non-fiction. Anything really. Jane Austen. A mystery. Harry Potter. Read whatever you enjoy.
Reading doesn’t just help you improve your language skills, it also gives you more to write about. There’s just one thing you have to be aware of. It’s difficult, perhaps impossible to write science fiction, or a thriller if you only read romances or vice versa. ‘Write about what you know’. This is very good advice.
That doesn’t mean you have to write about what you yourself have experienced. You can also write about what you’ve read a lot about. Or heard about from others. That doesn’t mean any gossip you might have picked up on the bus or at work. I’m talking about what you might have heard from a relative or a friend about a particular country/culture, profession, hobby etc. If you want to write about something you don’t know much about you will have to do research.
So read a lot. In fact not just books. The queen of mystery writing, Agatha Christie, once mentioned how important it is to read newspapers and magazines. It certainly can’t do any harm. Nowadays we also have radio, tv (including tele-text) and the internet. Keep up do date with the latest news. Go to the movies and/or watch DVD:s too.
7. This is something I haven’t tried myself, but I’ve been told that joining a critique group is a good idea. If you know other people who write or are willing to read and critique your work, this might be extremely useful. Getting feedback on your stories is vital. Just remember that other people aren’t divine. If you’ve seriously considered the critique and still don’t agree, just forget it. But in general you might want to be open to the fact that what you’re writing isn’t always perfect right away. No one starts out perfect.
The Revolution
A part of the revolution (and evolution). It feels a little like that. One little link in the long chain since the the art of writing was invented in Mesopotamia maybe five thousand years ago.
In an article that I read recently it says that the blog – the one you’re reading now is just one example among many – is a part of the evolution since Gutenberg invented the printing process. So – you and I and everyone else are a stage of the evolution.
In this article there was also something really interesting about how this collective way of expressing oneself will affect our ‘collective brain’ and society.
Really fascinating and we – you and I and all other bloggers – are a part of the revolution. We are watching history being made.
Once upon a time, printed books were viewed as a threat against high culture. Today the internet might be perceived as more of a threat than an asset. Others don’t ‘believe’ in the blog. But if the spies don’t win, if the greedy money grabbers are allowed to win, then maybe five hundred years from now, we’ll look back on the breakthrough for the internet as a new phase in cultural history and blogging as a part of journalism, as important as perspective in art, recorded music, literature in the form of printed books or printed newspapers.
Not so long ago, you couldn’t find out about current affairs and incidents that might have occurred, by opening your paper in the morning. People didn’t know what a paper was. Nowadays you can get news in many different forms, but back then you had to be grateful if you could hear about something, orally, from someone who had been present and seen what was going on.
It’s easy to forget that a blog isn’t just a cool kind of homepage, where you can post photos of yourself or post quizzes with images.
Think about the crisis in Burma – the blog was one of the most important ways of communicating with the outside world. That might give you another view of blogging. The medium is certainly versatile and important.
Long live the blog!
When I began to write stories
I don’t even remember exactly how old I was, but it was pretty soon after learning to read – at the age of three. I had these little note pads, where I was constantly writing little stories, based on the kind of books I liked to read, or had read to me. They’re all gone now, and that’s just as well. From what little I remember, those stories were really simple.
After that, I kept writing, but I don’t think there’s anything left from the time before I was ten or so. I wrote essays in school, but that’s hardly the same thing. One of them made my teacher ask my mom to come in and talk to her. Apparently I’d written something about how school was like a prison…
Several years later, I wrote another story about how I felt about school. It was about a little ant who was kept prisoner by her enemies…
Did I have any role models? Some, at least. Not counting the writers I read as a child (some of which I still return to) I didn’t have that many role models, but I did have my parents.
Mom used to tell me really great stories. I wish she’d written them down. In the past couple of years, mom has begun to write really cool children’s stories – many of them are about respecting animals, as well as people.
My dad used to write when he was a kid, mainly stuff for his school paper, but also some poetry. He once won a contest on his school for that poetry. I’ve been told that he also wrote some adventure stories, probably about space travel. His older sister was called in to help him with illustrations. She was a very kind sister. Even if she’d been out until late the night before, she’d always help her little brother out.
