Good Guidelines for Great Writing
Write for your audience. Writing is a service, whether or not you’re paid for it. Serve your readers well, and they will be better for having read your work. Use your audience for self-interested purposes, and you will lose your audience. Avoid self-indulgence in your writing; your reader is not your therapist. Don’t try to impress; self-aggrandizement delivers the opposite of its intended effect and discredits you. Consider the needs and interests of your audience. Where is the reader coming from? What will intrigue the reader? What will speak to the reader? What does your audience hope to get out of reading your work? Always write with the reader in mind.
Position yourself in relation to your reader as an equal and friend, not as a superior or expert. When teaching is your purpose, teach, but don’t preach. Don’t tell your readers how to think or feel; don’t spell everything out for them, either. Share your story. Let it speak for itself. Respect the intelligence of your audience. Trust them to read between the lines at times. Allow them to draw their own conclusions to some extent. Beware of forced writing or “trying too hard.” Be yourself. Be straightforward. Write with honesty. Even great fiction has an honesty about it.
Be clear and concise. Your content must be understandable. Transitional phrases or sentences connect the dots for the reader and advance the plot or message smoothly. Use simple words and eliminate repetition and clutter. With writing, usually less is more. However, be sure to develop or “flesh out” your text sufficiently. Leaving holes in your story-line will trip up the reader, who will then search, usually in vain, for what is missing. Confusion can also be caused by sentences and paragraphs that are not in logical order. This can happen during both the initial free-writing and the revision processes. When you revise, reorganize. Reading your work out loud can help you identify problems with clarity.
Never bore your audience. Avoid clichés and overused, unoriginal phrases. Concrete imagery and language gives your writing richness and interest. Use too much abstract or conceptual language, and your reader will start to yawn or scratch his head. Avoid wordiness, which makes writing sluggish and reading a chore. You want the words to move the reader along, not bog them down. And don’t cause the reader to stop altogether because he has to go get a dictionary. Use familiar words or words that carry clear meaning within context. Use a variety of sentence structures and lengths. Use more nouns and verbs and few adverbs and adjectives.
Love writing and what you write about. Your mood and attitude while you are in the act of writing will influence the tone of your writing. If you are engaged, enthused or emotionally moved, your reader will feel it. But if you are disinterested or focused on the act of writing itself, your writing will feel unnatural and alienating to your audience. The more you genuinely connect with your subject and the reader, the greater connection your audience will experience. Write for the reader and to the reader. Be present. Be truthful. Be connected.
Great writing is not about perfect writing. Of course we want to remove errors because they frustrate the reader and confuse meaning. But great writing starts with being genuine—both in voice and in motive. It’s about finding your voice, and then refining your voice. Great writing is clear, clean, concise, interesting and compelling. It involves honesty, respect, trust and connectedness between writer and reader. That kind of writing has impact.
copyright 2010 Erin Martineau