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Writing is as much a craft as it is an art. If you're a novice, you can improve your writing dramatically by learning the skills of the craft.

Just as you wouldn't sit down and dash off a quick quilt and expect to get something beautiful, so too you shouldn't dash off a quick article. You need to spend time with it, planning the final product, and stitching the words together with care.

Contrary to popular opinion, you don't have to write every day. Writing every day makes you a prolific writer, not necessarily a better one. It's very easy to churn out the same old drivel day after day!

A far better place to start is reading. Find work you admire and study it. Examine how the author uses words and sentences to communicate clearly or create images in your mind.

When you sit down to write, have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and you are writing for. A quilter works to a pattern. At the very least, you should have an outline, even if only in your head. Formulate a clear beginning, middle and end for prose forms.

Write your first draft and develop your argument. Then read through your work, looking for ways to express your thoughts more clearly. When you feel reasonably happy with it, go away. Have a cup of tea or coffee, phone a friend or get some chores done. When you come back to it later, you'll probably see more room for improvement.

Once you have a working draft, bring in your secret weapon. For a writer of prose, this is your word processor's readability statistics! They usually come up at the end of a grammar check, but you may have to turn the feature on. (The grammar checker is useful for catching errors your spell checker may miss, but I've never found them to be any good on actual grammar. Consider its suggestions but don't necessarily follow them slavishly. )

The statistics will give you two figures: a grade level, and a reading ease score. Unless you have a specific other target in mind, the lower the grade, and the higher the reading ease, the better! I usually aim for a reading ease of 70 for a grade 7 audience.

If your article isn't readable enough, there are two things you can do.

First, you can break up long sentences into shorter ones. Shorter sentences are easier to read, but too many of them can make the piece stilted. Keep a balance.

Second, you can try replacing polysyllabic words with shorter, pithier ones, e.g. use "longer" (two syllables) instead of "polysyllabic" (five syllables!)

Once your piece is nice and readable, spell check it then read it aloud. This will help you catch any stumbling blocks and you will get a nice feel for its flow. Once you're happy with it, compare it to your first draft and see how much you've progressed. You're a better writer already!

Take this approach every time you write an article, a story or a blog, whether you write once a day or once a year. You'll find that better, clearer writing soon becomes second nature!

Learn more about this author, Janet Pieterse.
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