Anthology of Ideas

Your writing style is your voice on the internet. Do you speak like James Earl Jones or Napoleon Dynamite? Remember that your words on the page are all that stand between you and your reader. They should catch the reader’s eye and draw them in. The following tips will help you improve your writing style.

Find your voice.

While styles grow and mature over time, there should always be some continuity in your writing. The way you set up your ideas and interact with them as well as the words you choose to use all make up your “voice.”

Write to your audience.

Not only does what you write matter but also how you write matters. You may a write a fabulous technical brief, but if it informal and uses too much slang it will not be given the attention it deserves. This applies to everything, if you write about informal things, be informal.

The structure of writing matters as much as the content because an overly loose structure is just as difficult to read and enjoy as badly written content. The following eight tips will help you to find your own specific writing style while providing a few “best practice” tips. These tips will apply to anything you write be it a blog post or dissertation.

1. The introduction should be helpful and interesting.

   The first thing people will see in any type of writing is the introduction, and most people won’t read any further if the first couple sentences don’t interest them. Think about your first sentence this way: you just searched Google for something and this sentence is the first thing you read about a website. Would you click to read more?

2. The main point, or thesis, should be stated in the introduction or at least clearly implied.

   This hearkens back to what your teachers told you in school: have a thesis because it makes it easier for the reader to figure out what you are trying to say, and if you are writing anything even close to an essay, it is polite to let people know what your 1000 word post is going to be about.