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It’s commonly believed that being an effective writer mostly requires a proper grasp of correct spelling, punctuation, and the ability to organize ideas clearly. While these are essential elements, they are not enough to truly stand out from the crowd. To be memorable, your writing needs to be more than understandable; it needs to be enjoyable. The reader must feel compelled to keep reading; not because they have to, but because they want to. To help explain this, we’ve put together a short list of quick tips that will help you to truly expand your potential as a writer.

1. Vary Your Words

To begin, it is normally for the best to show off your command of language and extensive vocabulary. A writer who knows four or five synonyms for a single word, and uses each of them, will often be assumed to be more educated and intelligent than someone who repeats the same words again and again and again. Rather than saying “the boats,” three or four times in the same paragraph, say “the boats,” “the fleet,” and “the flotilla” at different points.

2. Avoid Sentences That Are Too Long

More often than not, the longer a sentence is the more difficult it will be for a reader to understand. In general, you will want to vary your sentence length a bit, while keeping the majority of your sentences between one to three lines in length (or, in terms of word count, below sixty or seventy words). Doing so will go a long way towards avoiding unnecessary exhaustion for the reader.

3. Minimize Sentences That Are Particularly Short

At the same time, sentences that are too short can also be problematic. If most of your sentences are just three or four words long, your writing may be viewed as amateurish, or even infantile. If you want a reader to view you as an adult, be sure to include more than a few sentences between fifteen and twenty-five words. One caveat: none of this should be meant to suggest that short sentences are never acceptable. In fact, after a lengthy sentence of three or four lines, a single word with a period after it might be more impactful than anything else. What’s most important to remember is that almost anything, including both short and long sentences, can become dull or irritating if overused. Be sure to vary the length of your sentences, and use your best judgement in deciding how to vary them.

4. Use Tricks Like Alliteration And Rhymes

Let’s be honest for a moment: reading can be boring, particularly in a world with so many visual and electronic distractions available to us. That is why it is often the job of writers to make their words entertaining, in order to capture and keep the reader’s interest all the way to the end.
One such way is to match up words with similar sounds, such as with alliteration. Alliteration is a technique that involves stringing together several words that all begin with a similar consonant. “Peter Piper” would be an example of alliteration, as would be “Dunkin Donuts.”
A more familiar trick, though, might be the simple rhyme. While perhaps most commonly associated with music and poetry, rhymes are more than acceptable in everyday prose.
“The pirate was shouting and cursing and threatening to make them walk the plank.”
Just like with alliteration, rhymes help to give energy to the language and keep the reader reading.

5. Experiment With Plays On Words And Alterations Of Common Idioms

A great way to show off your writing talent is to make clever little twists on common English phrases and idioms. For example, one common idiom is “to add insult to injury.” Now, most people have heard this idiom a hundred times over, which makes it stale and boring, so let’s try to liven it up a bit. Suppose that there is a courtroom where a witness is testifying under oath, and, in addition to lying about a defendant committing a crime, the witness also calls the defendant stupid. In such a situation, one could say that the witness “added insult to perjury,” which takes the original phrase and replaces “injury” with a word that rhymes, altering the meaning to more specifically apply to the particular situation.

6. Try Using Antimetabole

This technique may be rather advanced, but can be a great way to display creativity through your words. An
“antimetabole”
is a phrase that gets repeated in reverse order. Some prominent examples include the following:
Antimetaboles are viewed as effective for their logic and their ease of remembrance. If the first half is viewed by the reader as true, then they will be more likely to accept the other half as true. While conjuring new ones out of thin air can be quite difficult, doing so will showcase your talent.

7. When Creating Metaphors, Use Older Imagery

A metaphor is generally defined as a word or phrase that refers to something, such as an object, action, or abstract concept, in a non-literal manner. Examples might include “the hailstones stabbed at my face like daggers,” or “neither she nor her forked tongue could be trusted.”
Metaphors can take many forms and involve any number of things. However, while you are of course free to use any type of metaphor you wish in your writing, I personally tend to follow what I like to refer to as “the grandfather rule.” In essence, “the grandfather rule” means this: if the imagery you wish to use involves something that didn’t exist in your grandfather’s day, or previous to your grandfather’s day, then steer clear. Things found in nature, like forests and rivers, and older technology, like shovels, streets, and arrows, would be perfectly fine to use for a metaphor. Newer technology, though, such as things invented after the 1930s or 40s, can feel lacking in authenticity.

8. Use The Right Tone For The Situation

A critical part of effective writing is recognizing who your audience is, and how to shape your message to appeal specifically to them. Creating the right tone is a crucial aspect of this. “Tone” often has to do with the emotional state that the writer is expressing, whether consciously or otherwise. Tones can be happy, angry, sad, excited, fearful, aggressive, emotionally vacant, or just about anything else under the sun.
Let’s look at a few examples:
All of these are essentially inviting someone to a birthday party, but in very different ways. One is excited and happy, the second is fearful, and the third is angry and possibly violent.
What type of tone do you want to use? It will be up to you to determine what tone is best for the situation you happen to be in, and the audience you are trying to communicate with.

9. Read

Practicing writing is a great way to get better at it, but without anything to compare your writing to you may have difficulty evaluating how much you are improving. As such, it is helpful to read, on an ongoing basis, what others are writing, and to borrow from their ideas and techniques to bolster your own skill level.
At this point, many who offer similar advice would likely focus on the titans of literature, such as Hemingway, Austen, Twain, and, of course, Shakespeare. However, while these are of course excellent sources from which to get inspiration for your writing, there are also any number of alternatives. Professional newspapers will get you comfortable with the basics, such as good grammar, as will some of the better blog postings that the web has to offer.