Heeding advice and praying for a little skill...

I have probably struggled with writing since I began in four-year-old kindergarten. Throughout the years, this fact has made me rather willing to listen to and utilize as much writing advice as possible, in order to finally perfect the art of writing. I am still waiting on this perfection….Something tells me this will not be coming anytime soon, so in the meantime, I will just continue to heed advice and pray for a little bit of skill. While striving for this perfection, I have collected numerous writing tips and have found my favorites and well, my not so favorites.

One of the best writing tips I have ever received applies to writing rather indirectly. This writing tip is to just read. It allows me to learn by example, shows me numerous techniques, expands my vocabulary and complexity of sentence structure, betters my understanding of proper phrasing and grammar practice, and the list could go on. Not to mention, reading is rather enjoyable and furthers my education in both school and life, enabling me to kill two birds with one stone.

Along with reading, I also believe that conversing or even listening to conversation can improve your writing, well, as long as its not being modeled after a bunch of five-year-olds’ conversations (no matter how witty you think they are). I also feel that this makes a lot of sense because when we were babies, we learned how to formulate sentences through listening to those who spoke around us, it’s not like we were handed a pencil and told to write sentences right off the bat. I realized that conversation had much influence on my writing as I reminisced back to four and half years ago, when I began dating an English major. His speech was much more eloquent than mine and over the past few years, I have thankfully picked up on his style, ability to structure sentences, and vocabulary, intermingling it with my own and improving myself as a speaker and writer. Not to mention, he enjoys buying me books for any occasion, which as I had mentioned earlier, reading helps to improve one’s writing.

Also, going hand-in-hand with this, I feel that reading your writing aloud will help to improve it too. Being able to hear what the piece sounds like allows one to check for phrasing, comma placement, sensible word order, flow, and allows you to grip a little better what is being said and how it is being explained. It really allows you to check your writing over, and I feel that is a very useful practice. I wish that I had remembered this piece of advice before turning in my personal statement for my graduate school application. This is because as I read it aloud AFTER turning it in, I realized how much I disliked it, a little too late. Now, I do not think I will ever be able to forget it this piece of advice.

Another lesson that the writing of my personal statement taught me is to “kill your darlings.” With a 5000 character limit, the writing must be clear and concise, getting to the main points, and cutting out much of the detail and description that I would have liked to have included for increased support. It is often tough to figure out what should be kept and what should be discarded, especially when much time and effort has gone into the piece, but it often has to be done, and the writing will survive without “your darlings.”

As much as I enjoy writing advice, sometimes the wrong advice is given and it can be detrimental to a writer’s development. For example, one of my English teachers ingrained in me that I was not allowed to use contractions EVER in my writing. Any writing assignment that I turned in would be severely downgraded for any contractions residing inside of it. Being young and impressionable, it became ingrained in me that contractions and writing papers should never commingle. Since I never had much time to pursue writing outside of school, it took years before I was set straight and realized that this was a stylistic element that I could include if I chose too. I also had a teacher who would down grade students for using helping verbs too often, which “too often” was determined by her. Yes, I know they are not the only verbs we should use, and it is a good practice to use more active verbs, but how are you supposed to develop as a writer when you cannot write in your own style in fear of being penalized. I can understand their practices a little bit, but I feel that it would be helpful if the allowed students a little more time to practice more expressive writing.

In the end, I feel that I have come across some great writing advice that has truly aided me in developing as a writer. I know that there is still so much to learn. I appreciate any of the tips that I can get…so if you have any to offer, I am all ears.