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.