6 Easy Ways to Improve Your Writing Style

• Crack a joke – but only for a good reason
Unfortunately, a lot of novice writers don’t quite know when to inject humor into their fictional tales. The result is they either miss opportunities to use an effective narrative tool or they misuse (and quite often overuse) it.

• Delete nulls
Sometimes the only purpose of a story’s sentence is to say that nothing happened. Such sentences are called “nulls.”
 
• Nix polysyllabism
Ever read a sentence in a story and wonder why the author couldn’t just use plain English? The author is guilty of polysyllabism, or using a long word for effect even though a shorter word is better.

• Why you should avoid being sensational 
Sensationalism essentially is overhyping…marketing pros might use it to sell you a product, politicians might use it to influence you opinion. Writers ought to avoid being sensational, however. 

• Vary syntax to give writing flavor, texture 
When writing, you’ll want to vary the syntax, which is the pattern of the sentence’s words – that is, the order of the parts of speech within a sentence.

• Watch for verb tense shifts in your writing
A common mistake among novice writers is shifting within their story so that events occurred in the now but then in the next paragraph happen in the past. This is a sign that the writer is changing verb tenses.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past 15 years, I’ve helped more than 350 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.

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