by Simon Wright

Created on: June 01, 2011

Writing is a very broad discipline and covers everything from an author writing a novel or short story, to a citizen journalist penning an article, to a copywriter drafting website content or a technical manual. When considering the main problems that blight writing, it would be easy to just focus on the more glamorous creative writing angle and talk about plot development, character dialogue, and other mainstays of novel writing. However, given that this article is about general writing problems, it’s important to broaden out the discussion to faults that will undermine all the main types of writing.

1. Lack of focus and planning:

The necessity of thinking about what you are going to write before putting pen to paper is a fundamental lesson that teachers attempt to drum into us at school. However, the temptation is often to jump straight in at the deep end, frantically typing words and trusting to some writing instinct to structure our output into something that will appear coherent and impactful.

The reality is that most of us will end up veering into dangerous territory if we don’t pause to think about what we want to write, what the audience needs to know, and how we are going to structure our novel/article/document.

2. Formatting, spelling, and grammatical errors:

Hopefully most readers will accept the occasional writing error. For example, whilst reading Stephen King’s novel Salem’s Lot I noticed a few typos but they were few and far between and in no way detracted from my enjoyment of the novel. However, we’ve probably all occasionally encountered written work that is littered with writing errors, from spelling and grammatical errors to hideous formatting faux pas. Such mistakes, at best, suggest laziness and can be irritating. At their worst, however, they can actually make it difficult for us to understand the meaning of what the writer is trying to say.

3. Too much or too little information:

Writers usually become writers because they enjoy crafting words onto pages. As a result, many have a tendency to use a hundred words when ten would suffice. At the other extreme, writing can be let down by a lack of information. For example, maybe you’ve introduced your reader to an interesting point but haven’t then gone on to provide the further context that would be required to fully benefit your audience.

Your objective, when writing, should always be to think about your audience and their needs/wants and to provide

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