How to become a good writer

Student’s Name:

Instructor’s Name:

Course Code and Name:

University:

  The date the assignment is due:                                       

Writing is both a profession and a skill. Everyone needs to learn some writing skills in order to be a better communicator. Being a good writer makes an individual express his ideas more accurately. Writing skills may be acquired in a variety of ways. Meanwhile, whichever way in which one chooses to acquire wring skills, the most important thing to do is to practice a lot and to pay attention to detail. 

ORDER NOW

Written work can be critiqued at many different levels. These levels, according to Goldberg include grammar, punctuation, semantics, vocabulary, and use of jargon (172). In order to be a good writer, one has to know about the elements that are required for different forms of writing. For instance, the type of jargon that is used in business writing is different from the one that is used in legal literature.

In formal writing such as business correspondence and academic work, grammatical mistakes are unacceptable. In informal writing such as email messages between best friends, it is acceptable to make grammatical and semantic mistakes. The ability to juggle between different varieties of a language while communicating is a skill that has to be acquired. This is the skill that makes a writer to be regarded as an artist.

Professional writers receive specialized training in various areas such as print journalism, electronic journalism, broadcast journalism, reporting, article writing, and creative writing. In print journalism, writers should be able to make the best use of limited space in order to communicate a lot of information to a mass audience. The choice of words should be clear, unambiguous and precise. The choice of words should sound familiar to the general audience while at the same time appearing to be relevant to a specific readership that is interested in the information being conveyed.

A good writer should be able to use various literary stylistic devices to achieve his ends of getting the message across in an interesting way. Bad writers bore the reader with clumsy descriptions that do not hint at any specific issue. To be a good writer, you must exploit such literary devices as allegory, similes, metaphors, allusion, intonation, stress, sarcasm, satire and foregrounding. For writers who work in the mass media, it is impossible to use all these styles in the same piece of writing. However, it is very advisable to keep using one style or the other at different times in order to hone one’s writing skills while at the same time, keeping all readers interested in the theme of the articles, news items, commentaries or reviews.

A good way of improving one’s skills as a writer is to learn how to read other people’s written work and to critique it. These works may include short stories, novels, newspaper articles, poems, legal documents, business letters, online articles and all other types of written work. By reviewing many forms of writing, one learns to understand the processes that go on in the reader’s mind. Additionally, by reading other people’s written works, one encounters new vocabulary and learns how to use it well.

In conclusion, writing is a very interesting skill to acquire. Every good writer pays attention to the world around them in order to perceive as many things as possible. Many great creative writers claim that while writing, they tend to get inspiration from the environment around them. Moreover, a good writer has an inquisitive mind and always wants to know something new about the world. A good writer always thinks about how every conceivable scenario can be expressed in writing. Writers who want to hone their writing skills even go-ahead to write about anything that comes into their minds, just to make use of a recently acquired literary style.  As Rohman, says, no good writer can submit his work to an audience without editing it first (107).

Works Cited

Goldberg, Natalie, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, London: Routledge, 2010.

Rohman, Gordon, “Pre-Writing the Stage of Discovery in the Writing Process” College Composition and Communication, 16.2 (1965): 106-112.