How I Write

Writing can be difficult, and everyone has their own way of going about it. I have two ways that my writing gets done. I share them that they might give you inspiration for your writing project. You’re welcome. 

The Instinctual Way

If I ever have something to say but don’t know where to start, I just start ranting in a word document. My strong feelings and opinions are let out like bullets from a machine gun. That is how this article is being written.This works best when you know a lot about whatever you will write about. Your first thought leads to your second thought which leads to your third thought and so forth.One thing to remember about this method is that you need to go back once you’re done and order your thoughts. The dozens of one liner arguments and opinions sound great by themselves. But they need to be put in an order that makes sense. Take every paragraph and write out the general sentiment of it. Then look at your paragraph summaries. Are you telling your story in order? Could you reorder them to improve readability?Unfortunately, it’s rare that my brain is able to unload an entire rant on something. The rest of the time, I only have a general idea of what my post will be. 

The Organized Way

If you know your topic, but don’t have the one liners and emotion to back it up, fear not.Write an outline. All you need to start are an intro, thesis, three points, and a conclusion. Take your topic and decide on the three parts of this area you want to discuss. Then identify the main message you want to communicate through those points. This will be your thesis. Then come up with a story or an example that illustrates your thesis.You now have a skeleton of an article. From here, add some backup in the form of logic, quotes, stories, and so forth to your points. Write out the intro, telling your short story, stating your thesis, then diving into your points.Finally, conclude by restating your thesis and how the points supported it, and even maybe a callback to the story you told at the beginning. 

Finally, Edit

Both methods are great but don’t do squat unless you go back and improve your article. Here’s how.Read your article out loud. If it doesn’t sound good coming out of your mouth, chances are that it won’t read well either. You’ll also catch sentence fragments and bizarre/run-on sentences.Yoast, a plugin for Wordpress, tells you the readability of your article, as well as what you can do to improve it.Then there’s Grammarly. This extension to Chrome serves as a word correction tool for grammar, punctuation, and spelling. It’s better than built-in auto-correct because it checks with you before making the changes, and also catches when you forget to add articles, use an incorrect tense, and so forth. 

The Secret Weapon

Even with all these tips, your writing won’t be perfect. Thankfully there’s a trick to getting better at writing. I’ve only used this trick for three weeks and its working wonders.Blog every day for a month. It sounds crazy, but do it. To learn anything requires repetition and constant improvement. Do this, and all of the tips I’ve shown will become second nature.