6 Easy Ways to Improve Your Writing Style

• Crack a joke – but only for a good reason
Just as in real life when humor is used to ease tension in social situations or to bond with another person, so jokes and comedy serves a purpose in your story. 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 from your novel, short story 
Sometimes the only purpose of a story’s sentence is to say that nothing happened. Such sentences are called “nulls.”

• Don’t be guilty of polysyllabism (Huh?)
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.