100 Ways to Improve Your Writing: Proven Professional Techniques for Writing With Style and Power by Gary ProvostAs the name suggests, this book by Mr. Gary Provost outlines 100 ways to improve writing. These 100 ways are divided into crisp eleven chapters. The book is a handy treasury of ideas, interesting examples and functional pointers that may turn out to be super-useful for anyone seeking refinement of their writing, and accelerate the momentum of their writing process. In this review, I share 46 pointers that I curated upon reading the book.
For easy rememberance, I’ve divided the video into 3 parts – Quick Tips & Tricks, Lessons in the Craft of Writing & Common Errors and Mistakes To Avoid in Writing.
Let’s breeze through these!
QUICK TIPS & TRICKS
#1 Get some reference books
• Get some Reference Books such as a dictionary, encyclopedia and thesaurus.
#2 Improve Your Spellings
#3 Expand Your Vocabulary
#4 Read
• Read, and listen to what you read. Listen for the sound of the language, the music. Note the punctuation, the spelling, the logical progression of information.
#5 Take a class
#6 Research. Join a library.
#7 Eavesdrop
• Be nosy. Listen to conversations on the bus, in the elevator. Screen out the words sometimes and listen only to the music. Tune into teenagers’ conversations and you’ll pick latest slang. Find out what people are talking about, what they care about. All of this will help you to communicate more effectively through your writing.
#8 Write in your head
• If you have spent time writing in your head, you’ll have a head start when you actually sit down to write.
#9 Copy Something
• Copy quotes, sentences, paragraphs and writing from some popular or famous works.
#10 Keep a journal
• If you’ve some sort of notebook or diary that you return to often with your written thoughts, opinions, observations and various bits of wit, you’ll have a place in which to exercise your writing muscles. You’ll learn to write succinctly and clearly the events of your daily life. You’ll learn to pluck from each event just the details needed to create a sense of the whole. If you keep a journal, you’ll grow as a writer, and you’ll find that sooner or later, no matter what you’ve to write professionally, your personal experiences will play a part.
#11 Do Writing Exercises
#12 Organize Your material
• Organizing will help you lock in the logic of what you say, and it’ll speed the writing process. Organizing will help to create an overall unity as well as several interior unities.
#13 Make a list or a checklist.
#14 Picture a reader
• Write a letter to your imaginary reader. icture the reader to be in the room with you.
#15 Steal
• Be a literary pack-rat.
• Brighten up your story with a metaphor you read in the Sunday paper. Make a point with an anecdote you heard at the barber shop. Let a character tell a joke you heard in a bar. But steal small, not big. Be wary of plagiarism.
#16 use examples, quotations, quotes, facts and anecdotes in your writing
#17 Colour your stories with your opinions
• You don’t have to care whether the reader agrees with your opinion or not, the reader only has to respond to it.
#18 Ask Yourself Why You’re Writing
• What are your goals? Are you trying to make your readers laugh? Are you trying to persuade them to buy a product? Are you trying to advise them? Are you trying to inform them so you can make a decision?
• You must know what you want done before you pick the tools to do it.
LESSONS IN THE CRAFT OF WRITING
#19 Find a Slant
• Do not try to write everything about your subject. All subjects are inexhaustible.
• Tie yourself to a specific idea about your subject. This idea is called slant. Ex: Glass windows – stained glass windows
#20 Write a strong lead
• The lead is whatever it takes to lead your readers so deeply into your story or article that they’ll not turn back unless you stray from the path you’ve put them on.
• A good lead is the one that is provocative, energetic, of appropriate respective length and gives the readers something to care about.
#21 How to Write Beginnings
• Cross out every sentence in the initial drafts until you come to the one you cannot do without.
• Set a tone and maintain it.
#22 Use Pyramid Construction
• Writing in pyramid style means getting to the point at the top, putting the “who, what, when, where and why” in the first paragraph and developing the supporting information under it.
#23 Use topic Sentences
• A topic sentence in a paragraph is a sentence containing the thought that is developed throughout the rest of the paragraph.
#24 Write short paragraphs.
#25 On Transitions In Writing
• Use transitional phrases to make the transition between sentences quick, smooth, quiet, reliable and logical.
• Use bridge words for transitions.
• Don’t use transitions to conceal information. Ex: Don’t write “John went to the museum” if later you intend to show that John had an accident while going to the museum.
• Explain, not acknowledge, the awkward transitions.
#26 On STYLE
• Style is the way an idea is expressed, not the idea itself.
• Style is form, not content.
• A reader usually picks up a story because to the content but too often puts it down because to style.
• there is no subject that cannot be made fascinating by a well-informed and competent writer.
#27 Writing is music
• To write is to create music. The words you write create sounds and when these sounds are in harmony, the writing will work.
• Listen to your writing.
• Listen for the dissonance. Listen for the beat. Listen for the gaps. Listen for the sour notes.
#28 Vary sentence length.
• This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.
SO, write with a combination of short, medium and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ears. Don’t just write words. Write music.
#29 Know how to use punctuation correctly
• Don’t use punctuation as decoration. Avoid using unnecessary dashes, ellipses or quotation marks, the way drunks use whiskey.
• Use Commas to add clarity to a sentence. Read it aloud. In a pause really needed for clarity?
• Use a Semicolon when a comma would not give your sentence the sufficient pause. Also, to separate a word series that contain commas. For instance, He bought soda, potato chips, icecream and candy; several games; three record albums.
• Colons are used to introduce lists, formal quotations and examples.
• Use exclamation only when exclaiming and question marks only when asking questions.
• Trust your sentences to reveal emotions. Don’t rely on punctuation to show how much feeling you bring to your writing.
• All words taken directly from another’s speech or writing must be set off in quotation marks. Do not use quotation marks around the words that are not directly taken from a speech or writing. If a quote is contained within a quote, use a single quotation mark for the inner quote. Use quotation marks around word or phrase you intend to explain.
#30 Respect the rules of grammar
• The rules of grammar organize the language just as the rules of arithmetic organize the world of numbers.
• Grammatical rules about tense, gender, number, person and case provide us with a literary currency that we can spend wherever english is spoken or read.
#31 Prefer Good writing to Good grammar
• Keep in mind that good grammar, even perfect grammar, doesn’t guarantee good writing any more than a good referee guarantees a good basketball game.
#32 Create a strong title
• a good title is short.
• a good title will make the reader curious
• a good title reveals information, not hide it
• a good title suggests the slant of the story
#33 On Writing Complete & Incomplete Sentences
• “The cat jumped off the roof” is a complete sentence. “The cat jumped” is also a complete sentence. ‘The cat” however, is not a complete sentence.
• Write complete sentences 99% of the time. But every now and then, if a partial sentence sounds right to you, that’s what you should write. Period.
#34 Show don’t tell.
• Trust the reader to understand what you’re showing through your writing.
#35 Use parallel construction
• Just as the steady beat of a drum can often enrich a melody, the repetition of a sound can often improve the music of your writing. This is called parallel construction.
• Fish gotta swim and flying is something that birds should do. – Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly.
#36 Use words that are short, dense & familiar
• Instead of once a month, use monthly.
• Instead of something new, use novel, etc.
#37 Use strong verbs. Use active verbs.
• Verbs, words of action are primary source of energy in your sentence. Active verbs do something. Inactive verbs are something. Set your sentence in motion by using strong & active verbs.
• Ex: The clock was in the corner of the wall. – The clock towered in the corner of the wall.
• Turn look into stare, gaze, peek, etc.
• Be suspicious of adverbs.
#38 Be specific
• Picture a box. Picture a black box. Picture a black box with silver hinges.
• Be specific in your writing without being too wordy.
#39 Don’t force a personal style
• Style is not something you can put into your writing like a new set of clothes. Style is your writing. It is inexorably knotted to the content of your words and the nature of you. So do not pour the clay of your thoughts into the hard mold of some personal writing style that you’re determined to have. Do not create in your head some witty, erudite, exciting persona and try to capture him or her on paper. Strive instead to write without self-consciousness. Then your style will emerge.
COMMON ERRORS & MISTAKES TO AVOID IN WRITING
#40 On Editing Early Drafts
• You’ll make mistakes in your early drafts. That’s okay. But before you type the final draft, let atleast a day pass, and then think carefully about what you wrote before turning to your typewriter. You may find that what you thought was brilliant prose on Tuesday borders on the moronic by Friday. On the other hand, you may discover that, what seemed trivial when you wrote it, is, in fact, profound.
• Cut unnecessary words. They’ll slow you down.
• Read aloud your work.
• Avoid using too many footnotes, jargon, parentheses and clichés
#41 Use specific nouns.
• Be on lookout for adjectives that are doing the work that could be done by a noun.
• Adjectives do for nouns, what adverbs do for verbs.
#42 Avoid Splitting infinitives
• A splitting infinitive when an adverb is placed between the word to and the verb. Ex: she wanted to quickly reach home. She wanted to reach the home quickly
#43 Avoid shifts in pronoun forms
• When one has written the paper, they should take a break. – when one has written the paper, one should take a break.
#44 Avoid Dangling Modifiers
• A dangling modifier is a word or a group of words that appears to modify an inappropriate word in the same sentence.
• The error occurs most often when passive rather than active voice is used.
• In drawing the picture, his wife was used as the model. In drawing the picture, he used his wife as the model.
#45 Do Not change tenses in the sentences of the same paragraph.
#46 learn how to use the possessive case
Ex: The perfume lost it’s scent. (Incorrect)
The perfume lost its scent. (Correct)
Thank you! 🙂✍️💟
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