Here are 13 hits, suggestions, and tips that will hopefully help you become a better writer.

Use specific as opposed to general words, e.g., sad vs miserable, thirsty vs parched. Always have a thesaurus open and use it often.

Bonus: learn the roots of words—doing so will make you a better writer and thinker. 1

If you don’t know whether or not a sentence is grammatically correct, just rewrite the sentence in a way you know is correct.

Bonus: figure out the source of confusion. 2

“People can forgive a bad middle but not a bad beginning or ending.”

Work on your introductions and your conclusions. This is especially important in the tl;dr age.

Bonus: connect your intro and your conclusion—pull exact words, tell a story where you’ve learned something. 3

Have people you trust read over what you’ve written. Give them a date and time to get it back to you. Tell them more specific comments are better. I prefer MSWord’s Track Changes.

Bonus: once you edit what they send back to you, send it to them again. Re-edit. Repeat. 4

Develop a strategy for contractions. I use contractions when ideas are complicated. I spell out words if the concepts are simple, or for emphasis: “You cannot go” vs “You can’t go.” The former is more forceful.

Bonus: intersperse easy & difficult ideas on a single page. 5

Include the “higher level” content in the footnotes/endnotes. Think Pixar—it has something for adults *and* children. You can approximate that in “print” media by simplifying the main text and “upping” the endnotes.

Bonus: speculate in the endnotes. 6

After you’ve written something do a word count. Delete 10% of the words. Yes. You can.

Bonus: delete 20%. Yes. You can. 7

“Moral editing” is an invaluable skill.
Figure out the moral biases of your target audiences and address those in your writing.

Bonus: if it’s for a professor or a peer reviewed journal, understand their biases by reading past work. 8

It’s better to be wrong and clear than incoherent. Use the “rule of 19”. (Not a real rule, I just made it up.) Pretend your audience is 19 years old—that is, they’re smart but ignorant. The burden of clarity thus falls upon you.

Bonus: use the rule of 17. 9

Try to not use the same word twice in a sentence.

Bonus: try to not use the same word more than four times per page. 10

Be very, very careful with reference words like “them” & “it”. Spell out what “it” refers to. Notice this sentence, above, that I edited:

Develop a strategy for contractions. I use contractions [them] when ideas...

Bonus: don’t end a sentence with it. <—Joke. 11

Some words have gravitas. Others don’t. You can hear the difference, for example, with kind vs nice. Orient your writing around the former and avoid the latter.

Bonus: when writing characters, have one you don’t like traffic in insipid words—vocabularies absent gravitas. 12

Perfection is the enemy of done. Write daily. Then edit. Edit. Edit. When it’s done it’s done. Submit and begin your next piece. Repeat. 13