100 Ways to Improve Your Writing (Updated): Proven Professional Techniques for Writing with Style and Power

Conversations stumble; they stray; they repeat; they are bloated with, you know, like, meaningless words; and they are often cut short by intrusions. But what they have going for them is human contact, the sound of a human voice.

write in your head. Clear up the inconsistencies while you’re brushing your teeth. Get your thoughts organized while you’re driving to work. Think of a slant during lunch. And most important, come up with a beginning, a lead, so that you won’t end up staring at your keyboard as if it had just arrived from another galaxy. If you have spent time writ

For the writer of average intelligence and education, learning new words is much less important than learning to use easily the words he or she already knows.

A lead should be provocative. It should have energy, excitement, an implicit promise that something is going to happen or that some interesting information will be revealed. It should create curiosity, get the reader asking questions.

Readers will like you if you show that you are human. In a how-to piece, for example, you might write, “This third step is a little hard to master. I ruined six good slides before I got it right. So be smarter than I was; practice on blanks.”

Style is not something you can put onto 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.

People is the one subject that everybody cares about.

To write is to create music. The words you write make sounds, and when those sounds are in harmony, the writing will work.

You cannot write securely on any subject unless you have gathered far more information than you will use.

Use a semicolon to separate word series that contain commas. They bought soda, potato chips, ice cream, and candy; several games and toys; and three books.