Tips for the Writing Impaired

1.  The number one tip is to not plagiarize.  Even if it is a dark and stormy night or the best of times and the worst of times, never use another’s idea and present it as your own work.  Just because you purchased it off the Internet does not mean it is truly yours!

2.  Put air in your text, either by using short indented paragraphs or by putting an extra space between paragraphs that are placed flush margin left. Preferably, that air is unpolluted, cloudy, and even stormy.

If you write in one continuous, dense, sentence-thick block of text, your reader’s eyes glaze over and the weight of the words forces the reader to either skim or give up on your brilliant, innovative writing.

See, now doesn’t all that air make you feel better?

3.  Only write with narrow margins, big font, and with really short chapters if you feel like the only readership you can snag are the contemporary semi-literates with short attention spans and a thirst for gladiatorial combat.  Blunder Games may make you an easy million, but your readers will not be prepared for something more mind-bending, like Oliver Twist or even Cat in the Hat.

4.  If u r riting 4 a formal audience (lol), drop the colloquialisms and text speak.  (If you didn’t notice anything wrong with that sentence, you are in deeper trouble than you thought!)

5.  In formal writing, avoid slang, nonstandard English, contractions, ostentatious language, and regionalism.  “Pitchin’ a fit” may mean something to a homemaker in the South, but your broader audience will be as lost as a coon in a quarry.

6.  Clichés are overworked words and phrases, that were once as right as rain and as comfortable as a worn pair of slippers, but now they are simply redundant.  If you can’t think of a fresh way to say something, then, yo, get a life!

7.  Sexist language is supposed to be something to avoid, but it can get awkward for the reader if she / he / it has to wade through all those slashes to get his / her / its grasp on the content.  Better to reword and avoid some of the unnecessary pronouns and possessives.

8.  Revise, revise, revise.  Edit, edit, edit.  And never trust your computer’s Spell-check function.  Form it’s beginning, it has knot bin able to distinguish be tween good end proper con tent.  So stretch a brain cell and do the work yourself!

Whew, I needed more air!

(For more tips, see this previous blog:  “Lilly’s Top Ten Writing Tips.”  And I would link this if I could, but I am link deficient.)