Is writing your strength? If your answer is yes! There is another question for you to ponder upon and answer yourself. What is the strength of your writing? Or, rather, what are the strengths of your writing? I believe these questions are very straight and you might be having very straight answers to these questions. Some of you can start listing down the answers as soon as these questions are put across.
Many of us can list down: Good Command over the language, Good Knowledge of Grammar and sentence construction, Good Vocabulary and list goes on. Many of us believe that we can achieve creating a good piece of writing if we have these ingredients as our weapon to use. To a great extent we are quite correct in our approach. However, we will be missing the larger picture if we don’t have the good thinking. To me good writing is about good thinking.
The powerful writing is not merely the selection of some special words, but the formation of good thoughts. This is the difference between an elegant prose written by a renowned author and an amateur writer. You may call it a great writing! It is in fact great thinking. To achieve any emotion and passion, words must reflect value-added thought. The reflection of good writing can be a visual part in any form, be it script, an article, an essay, an advertisement or a user manual.
Writers sell their writing because what they write about and not how they write it. Moreover this is a controversial statement and many of the people would not agree with me. But the point what I want to make is the content in your writing. Readers like to read piece of your writing because of your content. If the content is important, have appeal, value and mesmerizing effect, it is bound to sell.
Whereas if you have created writing and have made a brilliant display of your impeccable language skills but failed to address what are you trying to say through your writing then there is something missing. Do you believe it will create any interest among the readers? I doubt. Reader will lose interest in the middle and switch over to something else. So, a brilliant piece of language would not really sell.
For that matter, even the good content written in poor manner with grammatical mistakes and with poor presentation will not enthuse a reader to go through the end of the write-up. Therefore, the message is, a good writing should have a good content and good language.
So, your writing has to be a mix of good thought and good language. The question is how can you have both in your writing. Mind you, it’s not an easy task. But nothing is impossible. What should be the best practice to emulate these in our writing, which can add value to our writing legacy and command respect from the readers. The two principles what has worked for me very effectively are: critical thinking and rigorous editing.
I create my article with many passes. These passes are nothing but visiting and re-visiting the write-up for editing until I get satisfied that my message can get through the reader well. You can have a look how it goes.
First pass: Write down my thought without any hindrances.
Second pass: Categories the paragraph and reshuffle it up and down to create a real good story in readable format.
Third Pass: check for the language legibility, spellings and errors.
Fourth pass: Look into the article with intent to search for the inner beauty—Is it appealing to the reader?
Fifth pass: Go through hurriedly to note that even casual reading can make you understand the content of the write-up.
Sixth pass: Do you see any value in the write-up?
If satisfied, then finally passed to publishing. Off course these are my working steps, which has worked in favor of me for past few years at least creating a face value as a writer. It might work with you as well. Give it a try or else get a good working steps of your own which can establish you to be a better writer. Choice is anyway yours.
