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Improve Your Writing: Your Role as a Writer
This overview of Grammar and Composition begins by asking you to examine your role as a writer: your attitudes toward writing, your background, your methods, and your goals. From there we'll take the view that writing is a process--a series of inter-related steps that can be practiced and developed just like any other skill.
Ten Quick Tips to Improve Your Writing
Whether we're composing a blog or a business letter, an email or an essay, our goal should be to respond clearly and directly to the needs and interests of our readers. These ten tips should help us to improve our writing whenever we set out to inform or persuade.
Seven Secrets to Success in English 101
Welcome to English 101--sometimes called freshman English or college composition. It should be one of the most enjoyable and rewarding courses in your college life. But to succeed in anything, it helps to be prepared. So, as an old college English instructor, I'm going to let you in on seven secrets to success.
Ten Principles of Effective Writing
In his book "Style," F.L. Lucas offered the following basic principles to "shorten that painful process" of learning how to write better.
Twelve Tips for Improving Online Writing
Most online reading is actually skimming and scanning. So to grab and hold our readers' attention, we can't afford to waste words. The trick to writing lean on our blogs and websites is to keep the meaning and cut the rest. Here's how.
Top Ten Editing Tips for Business Writers
You can make your working life a little easier by editing your writing with these principles in mind: be clear, concise, considerate, and correct. Here are ten quick editing tips for on-the-job writers.
The Write Attitude--and Your Writing Goals
Do you want to improve your skills as a writer--or have you just been told (probably by a teacher) that you MUST improve your writing skills? Here we will consider how our attitudes toward writing can help or hinder our development as writers.
Getting Started with Freewriting
Freewriting is a useful strategy to help you overcome writer's block and get started on any writing project.
Getting Started with Brainstorming
Brainstorming is a group project that's especially useful for generating, focusing, and organizing ideas for an essay or a report.
Your Writing--Private and Public
As we work to shape a positive attitude toward writing, we may find that private writing (in other words, writing that we do just for ourselves) can also help us to become more confident with our public writing (the writing we do for others).
Your Role As a Writer
Compose a letter to yourself in which you examine your writing background and identify your strengths and weaknesses as a writer.
The Writing Process
No single method of writing is followed by all writers in all circumstances. We can, however, identify four basic steps that most successful writers follow in one way or another.
The Characteristics of Good Writing
Good writing is much more than just correct writing: it is writing that responds directly to the interests and needs of our readers.
The Advantages of Reading Aloud
Here we learn that reading was not always a silent activity and that the experience of reading aloud can be enjoyed by people at any age.
Top Ten Proofreading Tips
Hear what Mark Twain had to say on the subject of proofreading, and then consider our ten tips for proofreading effectively.
Self-Evaluation of Essays
Writing a brief self-evaluation each time you have completed a writing project will make you more aware of your strengths as a writer and help you to see more clearly what skills you need to work on.