Author: Vidya Prabhakar
Alright, so now you have got past the major obstacle of putting pen to paper and writing out your piece. The next task is to look at your writing and weed out errors and presentation flaws. By this, I mean you review your work as a whole and later bisect it word by word or sentence by sentence. Here are some pointers that aid in overcoming some of these common errors.
- To start with, distance yourself from your writing – this makes it easy to objectively view your writing and revise it without feeling like you have a paper cut. This approach teaches that any critique of your writing is not a personal criticism hurled at you. One way to do this is to revise and re-read your article a few hours or even a day after you have written it so you can view it objectively.
- Write for the joy of writing and not for the praise and attention that you want to get for writing a good piece. There is nothing wrong with basking in all the attention, but writing because you want to write brings out the best in your work. Devoid of any self-imposed stress and pressure, your work is more likely to be a natural reflection of yourself.
- Read your piece out aloud – here, you will be betraying signs of completely “losing it”- to those around you! Reading aloud is a good way to “hear” what your writing conveys. It helps to assess sentence structure, choice of words and clarity of thought.
- Dare to rewrite. Review/ revision is a way to let your creativity run wild all over again and to edit and knock out all the extra frills and build it up with new ideas and give the project a fresh touch.
- Pay attention to the overall flow in your writing. Coherence is a keystone in writing. Bridge gaps where required to achieve a seamless flow. A logical sequence which may be on the lines of introduction, theme / plot development, analysis and a conclusion will carry a reader through.
- Be precise in your writing. Good choice of words can vividly describe what you want to say. For example, you might describe “beautiful day” as “It was a warm Saturday morning, the clouds were floating gently in the vast expanse of the sky”. It adds body to your writing and helps the reader to picture the scene.
- On the same token, do not explain too much! Do not “tell” when you can “show” an image. Trust you ability to create an image and give your reader some room for imagination. Imagination is one of the joys of reading- else your reader would prefer watching something passively on television to reading your work!
- Watch out for redundancy, do not use the same clichéd phrases over and over again- less is more, sometimes.
- Be direct in your writing. Long rambling sentences only dull a reader’s interest. Do not sacrifice brevity for the sake of clarity. It works conversely as well. It is an art to balance the two.
- Check your punctuation. Usage of appropriate punctuation largely determines if the correct idea is conveyed. A favourite example here is the story of a King who pardons a convict. He declared “hang him not, free him”. It was communicated as “hang him, not free him”. I suppose none of us would want to trade places with the poor convict.
I remember a time when I was a 12 year old; I wrote a letter to my aunt. It was filled with exclamation marks to show I was bubbling with joy and excitement. My cousin, who made it his business to read the letter, albeit not meant for him, said to me that all he could see were exclamation marks in the letter! While at that time it seemed like a cruel comment, I understood that too many unwanted punctuation marks may distract or slow down a reader.
As you review, renew and reshape your writing, it gets polished. It takes us back to the beginning, if you can write, you can dare to weed out your errors and present your piece in style.
About the author:
Full Name: Vidya Prabhakar – Vidya is a Chartered Accountant and a Psychology postgraduate. She has worked in finance, banking and the content development industry. Reading, writing, baking and needle crafting are among her many pursuits.
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