Last time I spoke about this sexy smart suit you put on your writing to make it look really good. Now I will be telling you how to wear this suit and what to match with it to make it look even better.
Your style has a huge influence on your writing and how strong your writing is. Remember you want to make your writing look crispy and clean, I am sure if you do this your readers will be captivated by your writing.
You might have some smart ideas, quotes and some really great sentences. But if they don't match or go together then your writing looks like this picture, just no... its bad and never do this!
Strong verbs
Image credit
If your topic and writing is heavy and deep, make sure to have some great expressive verbs to back it up.
"To be" verbs, well chuck all those away and get creative, verbs are the make and break of your sentence strength.
Examples: From this link
Weak: My brother was being mean.
Stronger: My brother threw the ball at my face.
Weak: The sun was really bright on the snow.
Stronger: The sun shone brightly on the snow.
Weak: Being a nice person is a good way to be happy.
Stronger: Kindness leads to happiness.
Avoid Passive Voice Constructions
This is when your subject sits at the end of your sentence or when it is awkwardly placed within the sentence. Make sure your subject is before your strong verb in the sentence.
Examples: From this link
Passive: The election’s outcome was decided by the Supreme Court.
Active: The Supreme Court decided the election’s outcome.
Passive: The suspect was being held in custody by the police.
Active: The police held the suspect in custody.
Passive: Accusations were made and feelings were hurt. (Who accused? Whose feelings were hurt?)
Active: The supervisor accused his coworkers and hurt their feelings.
Increase Sentence Variety
Never use the same sentence format or pattern, you will just end up putting your reader to sleep. Changing this can be hard and you might struggle to find them. To help with this make sure you have different lengths of sentences, to many short sentences will make your writing seem childish, but very long sentences will make you loose your reader.
Avoid using phrases that the reader could guess (Clichés). But this also means that you don't use the same amazing phrase, you made up, over and over again. The trick is to keep your readers attention, do the unexpected in your writing.
Just on a little side note for self improvement. I will be doing pushups, situps and squats for the amount of $$$ I earn on this post and will give a short feedback every day at the end of each post. This will be split in equally between all 3. Any not done will carry onto the next day.
Thank you for the informative post. I have always been upset with myself for not paying better attention in 9th grader English class. I hope you continue to come out with these types of articles as I am sure they are not only helpful to me, but the Steemit community as a whole. Cheers!
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Great information! English is not my mother tongue and I know somehow I am weak in the lanuage. The point you mentioned, esp. the vocab, passive and sentence structure are definitely what I should improve! Thanks for your reminder and I would try my effort to learn though it's a long long way!
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Even I am not great when it comes to that, many things take a long time to learn and it can be a mission to edit your own writing. But I am sure it is worth it in the end. Thank you for your lovely comment , glad you found it useful.
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Thanks for the tips, I guess it's these little things you don't realise that can make a big difference.
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The smallest things done right always make the biggest difference when added up
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thanks for this valuable article.
after this my writing skills are like this :) ;)
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Hahaha I love this gif, thank you.
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i love this too :) it's one of the best gif i have ever seen.
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The typing gifs are always the best.
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I'm normally not a huge fan of cliche cat images/gifs/videos... but this actually made me cry laughing how do i resteem this
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I must say, often I feel as if I am picking up more from your articleshere than I could from apaying "creative writing" course.
Thanks for writing about this topic.
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Wow ok thank you for your comment. I am busy with an English writing course and these posts are what I share from the course.
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Recommended! Will improve my German English!
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Great piece of advice. It will surely help me to write some more especially now when i joined steemit and also i'm not a native speaker as well. Means a lot, will try to implement all your points into my work.
Not only i'll try to use stronger words, but also i would like to use wider variety of words cause i'm really bored and even angry at myself when i use too often words like "good" or "bad".
Good luck!
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hahaha well best of wishes and luck for your future on steemit. I am sure you are going to love it here.
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Wow...great post..& you are the great tutor..while reading your post, I feel , I am doing my IELTS/TOFFEL preparation. I am afraid to comment on your post, because I am not good at English, though I tried...If I made any mistake, please correct me on free of cost.
I am learning here in steemit with free of cost and also making some money... UPvoted
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This is a great place to learn, reading is one of the best ways to learn how to write English. So keep going and your writing will improve :D
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Ya..hope so..thank you for the nice reply...:))
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I upvote you. I follow you, you follow me back.
For daily nice posts.
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These are great tips especially for non-native speakers like myself. However I think there are those that are natural word-smiths. Also you could bet that those who write well have a reading rate (in number of books) that far exceeds those who don't.
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Yes I have to agree that reading and writing go along, the more you read the more you know and when you write you will know that the sentence is wrong because you have read so much and you know when a sentence sounds right.
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How I wish I have time to read :) I have friends who've read thousands of titles in their lifetime.
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I love these posts, I left school at a young age with no qualifications and found it very hard to read and write but now I am blogging on steemit, and enjoying every minute, and the strange thing is, people really seem to appreciate my post and the more I write the better I get. I love your posts as they make me think more about how I structure my sentences.
Thank you @dragonslayer109
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It is a pleasure. I was never taught this at school, which is shocking as schools are supposed to teach this in the English classes.
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Thank you :) have a wonderful day ;)
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great write-up as usual!
I need to start paying more attention to the way I write!
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Thank you, I really need to improve my English and your post helps!! Keep up the post
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It is a pleasure
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thanks for nice advices
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Very helpful tips especially for new writers just starting out. Thanks for this, I appreciate it :)
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I am glad you like it :)
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Thanks for this! I am not a native so this will help me big time :)
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It is a pleasure :)
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I'd like to also say that your posts have been helping me a lot as English is not my native language, but it totally is. Born and raised in Pennsylvania. I just have always sucked at English, punctuation, grammar, etc. These posts are truly helpful. I've been following you for nearly a year now, but I'm going to start aggressively watching for these IYW posts. Thanks for putting them together. And keep doing the examples of each tip for us simple folk. lol 🙏🙏🙏
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Well I am glad to see your comment on my post, thank you for all your support. I also suck at English, I really hated it at school and now that I am taking this course I am actually starting to enjoy it. I will keep the examples coming from now on.
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Very nice post.
Lots of Steemians will benefit from this.
Thank you.
@tremendospercy
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Great piece of advice that people will appreciate. Especially if they are starting out or are not native speakers.
One of the things that helped me improve drastically was showing my writing to others and receiving feedback. Also, extensions like Grammarly can also be extremely valuable.
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Great post. I am learning a ton. I have a regret now, that I didn't focus more in school about writing. Anyway thank you for sharing your knowledge.
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Great article, thanks so much for sharing @dragonslayer
@sunshinetraveler is following you for sure and I will upvote you.
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Unfortunately I have to disagree with some of your suggestions. For example, Stephen King wrote in his book On Writing to rarely use adverbs:
"The adverb is not your friend.
Adverbs … are words that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They’re the ones that usually end in -ly. Adverbs, like the passive voice, seem to have been created with the timid writer in mind. … With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/she isn’t expressing himself/herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across.
Consider the sentence He closed the door firmly. It’s by no means a terrible sentence (at least it’s got an active verb going for it), but ask yourself if firmly really has to be there. You can argue that it expresses a degree of difference between He closed the door and He slammed the door, and you’ll get no argument from me … but what about context? What about all the enlightening (not to say emotionally moving) prose which came before He closed the door firmly? Shouldn’t this tell us how he closed the door? And if the foregoing prose does tell us, isn’t firmly an extra word? Isn’t it redundant?
Someone out there is now accusing me of being tiresome and anal-retentive. I deny it. I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day . . . fifty the day after that . . . and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it’s — GASP!! — too late.
I can be a good sport about adverbs, though. Yes I can. With one exception: dialogue attribution. I insist that you use the adverb in dialogue attribution only in the rarest and most special of occasions . . . and not even then, if you can avoid it. Just to make sure we all know what we’re talking about, examine these three sentences:
‘Put it down!’ she shouted.
‘Give it back,’ he pleaded, ‘it’s mine.’
‘Don’t be such a fool, Jekyll,’ Utterson said.
In these sentences, shouted, pleaded, and said are verbs of dialogue attribution. Now look at these dubious revisions:
‘Put it down! she shouted menacingly.
‘Give it back,’ he pleaded abjectly, ‘it’s mine.’
‘Don’t be such a fool, Jekyll,’ Utterson said contemptuously.
The three latter sentences are all weaker than the three former ones, and most readers will see why immediately."
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Wow, you had a great lifestyle, you are improving your language, being active on steem and even do exercises?! I hope more votes will encourage you to do more squats haha.
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Hahaha thank you, I am dieing of the exercises as I am quite unfit right now. Squats are there to make my butt look sexy :D
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