Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer

the act of writing less as a special talent and more as a purposeful craft.

I once learned that only three behaviors set literate people apart. The first two are obvious: reading and writing; but the third surprised me: talking about how reading and writing work. Many of the tools came from great talk about the construction of stories and the distillation of meaning.

forms with a pencil. In the margins, categorize each verb. 2. Convert passive and to be verbs into the active. For example, “It was her observation that” can become “She observed.” 3. In your own work and in the newspaper, search for verb qualifiers and see what happens when you cut them. 4. Experiment with both voice and tense. Find a passage you

who traffic in words. To

the present. This strategy immerses readers in the immediacy of experience, as if we were sitting—right now—beside the poor woman in her grief.

You will find in this toolbox new ways of thinking, along with many familiar pieces of advice, dusted off and reframed for a new century. But where do writing tools come from?

Embedded in all that verbal activity is one splendid passive verb: “His pale eyes were frosted with sun glare.” Form follows function. The eyes, in real life, received the action of the sun, so the subject receives the action of the verb. That’s the writing tool: use passive verbs to call attention to the receiver of the action.

Nuts and bolts: strategies for making meaning at the word, sentence, and paragraph levels

1. Read through the New York Times or your local newspaper with a pencil in hand. Mark the locations of subjects and verbs. 2. Do the same with examples of your writing. 3. Do the same with a draft you are working on now. 4. The next time you struggle with a sentence, rewrite it by placing subject and verb at the beginning. 5. For dramatic variation,