Last week, I started editing a fiction project I’ve been working on for the last few months and it struck me how much my writing skills have grown over the years. I’m still far from perfect, but I can really see I’m not making certain mistakes anymore.
To become a good writer you may need talent, but deliberate practice is just as important—as with many other skills in life. A few months ago I read a book that focused on this aspect of deliberate practice and how important it is to get this right. There’s a big difference between practice and deliberate, focused practice. Practicing means you’re ‘just trying to get better at something’ without a concrete plan. Deliberate practice means you’ve identified a few areas where you want to see growth and have figured out what to do to get better.
In writing, this could be specific grammar skills (say, the use of comma’s), vocabulary, dialogue if you’re writing fiction, or maybe becoming better at using strong verbs. If you’re a blog writer, maybe it’s about crafting stronger blog titles, or structuring your paragraphs better.
Step 1 in improving your writing skills, then, is to identify where you want to grow. Step 2 is coming up with a way to do that.
One area I wanted to grow in, was grammar. I have a solid grasp of grammar skills in my native language, which is Dutch, but there are important differences between Dutch and English, for instance in the use of comma’s. My approach was to start reading books on grammar, but these turned out to be so dense that it was too much to remember all at once.
Instead, I decided to pick a new aspect every few weeks to improve. I started with comma use, then moved on to correct use of hyphens and dashes, and I have a few more specific areas I want to further develop. Because I’ve chopped this bog item of grammar use up into smaller chunks, it has become totally doable.
Step 3 is bringing what you’ve learned into practice. When I’m editing my fiction now, I’m hyper-focused on getting the commas right. Because I’ve fully grasped the theory behind it, I find myself making fewer and fewer mistakes in the first draft of whatever I write. That means I’m moving from a conscious skill that takes effort into an automatic skill and that’s exactly what I want.
Send Us Your Work to Be Critiqued
To help you improve your writing skills as well, I’ll be starting a new series here: the improve your writing skills lab. Every week, we’ll ‘critique’ a piece of writing and take away one or two areas where this writer could grow in. It could be anything from a sermon, to a blog post, non-fiction, a testimony, a short story or even a fiction book. We’ll look at a short passage (about 350 words) and discover what the writer could do to improve.
Are you up for this challenge? If so, send me your piece of writing you’d like to see critiqued to [email protected] and put ‘Writing Skills Lab’ in the subject. Remember: it can be any genre and has to be around 350 words. I promise I’ll be gentle, but honest!
For now, take some time to work through these three steps:
- What aspects in your writing need improvement? Where do you want to grow, specifically?
- How could you realize that growth? Are there books you could read with theory, is there a writer who is good at want you want to learn so you could discover his/her secrets, etc?
- Hoe can you practice what you have learned? How can you make it deliberate and focused?
Let me know what you’ve come up with in the comments!
[Image via Pexels]
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