by David Buttery

Created on: October 24, 2010

In writing, as in so much else, the learning process is a continuous one. You may write a story or article in middle school with which you are delighted, then go back to it years later and see major flaws in it that you would not have recognized at the time. If you truly wish to improve the quality of your writing, you must always be willing to learn. You must also be willing to practice: writing, like any other art form, is something which demands both ability and experience. One without the other is not enough.

The first thing to do? Read. Really, read a lot. Read everything you can find, whether it be good or bad, whether you like the author or not, whether you like the genre or not. Read both within and outside your comfort zone. Read short pieces, long pieces, and everything in between. Read, read, read. The successful writer who can develop a winning style without any influence from elsewhere is vanishingly rare, and if you try you will almost certainly fail. Make use of your local bookstores and public libraries. Doing this will repay your effort many times over.

 When you do come to write, it is important that you find your voice. That does not, of course, mean that you should write a comic short story in the exactly same way as an academic paper, but it does mean that you should write in a way that comes naturally to you. If you do, you are more likely to come across as both knowledgeable and interesting, a combination which will help you both attract and retain readers. Writing well in the voice of another, though, is one of the hardest things of all, which is why truly effective parodies are rather rare.

The "nuts and bolts" of writing — spelling, grammar, and punctuation — may be less interesting than the likes of plot and characterization, but they are crucial. No reader will put up for very long with a story which is filled with sloppy mistakes. It is well worth putting in the time required to learn how to use those "nuts and bolts", since if they do not come naturally to you, your writing will come to a juddering halt while you rack your brain for whether a comma or a semicolon is needed, or whether a certain word needs to be capitalized. If, however, such things come to you automatically, your writing is much more likely to flow smoothly.

Flow, in fact, is perhaps the most important factor of all. A piece which feels choppy and disjointed is more likely to irritate your readers than to captivate them, and many will

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