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

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

People is the one subject that everybody cares about.

Do not try to write everything about your subject. All subjects are inexhaustible.

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.

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.

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.

Do not write until you know why you are writing. What are your goals? Are you trying to make readers laugh? Are you trying to persuade them to buy a product? Are you trying to advise them? To prove an argument? To inform them so that they can make a decision?

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.”

“Why am I writing this?”