10 Quick Ways to Improve Your Writing
And how to apply them to what you’re working on right now
All new writers share a certain feeling. The feeling of doom when you open a fresh page, ready to start a new piece, but nothing comes out for ages. You stare at the blank screen, do backflips in your head, doubt your skills, your competence, your topic, you want to give up. You close the document, then open it again. And so the ritual goes until you have your first paragraph.
The more you write, the better you become, and the better you become, the more you want to push yourself. Hence, the ritual. But it doesn’t have to be so agonising. It doesn’t have to cause you so much dread to start a piece. You should just start writing.
For me, it took weeks of practice. Because I write several types of content — news, broadcast scripts, long-form features, self-improvement pieces, fiction, poetry — my skills have to switch in my head depending on what I’m working on. And that can be exhausting. I used to mix up the writing styles I needed to use for each type of article I wrote.
But once I started writing daily online, everything else came naturally. Back in October, on a digital newsday during my degree, it took me an hour and a half to start an article. It was a news piece about beauty salons struggling through…
