Writing Tips: Advice from One Writer to Another

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.

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.

Good writing is much more than just correct writing: it is writing that responds directly to the interests and needs of our readers.

In his book "Style," F.L. Lucas offered the following basic principles to "shorten that painful process" of learning how to write better.

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.

Hear what Mark Twain had to say on the subject of proofreading, and then consider our ten tips for proofreading effectively.

Behind each one of these phony rules of writing lies a good idea, but there are also good reasons why these so-called rules should sometimes be broken.

Language maven William Safire's best known column included these 17 fumblerules--"mistakes that call attention to the rule."

Freewriting is a useful strategy to help you overcome writer's block and get started on any writing project.

Brainstorming is a group project that's especially useful for generating, focusing, and organizing ideas for an essay or a report.

The job of teaching students how to write often leaves faculty with little time for their own writing. But it can be done, said Maxine Hairston, and she offered these 10 practical suggestions.

Listing a few stray thoughts or images can be done on the sly even when we're not in a writing frame of mind. Listing can help us overcome writer's block and discover fresh topics for paragraphs and essays.

Here's a project that will introduce you to brainstorming and give you practice in group writing. You will join with three or four other writers to compose a letter of complaint.

Readers are invited to recall when and how they learned to write. Please join the discussion.

Readers are invited to recall when and how they learned to write. Please join the discussion.

After you consider the following responses from seasoned journalists, novelists, scholars, and teachers, we'd like to hear your thoughts on whether writing can be taught.

Can writing be taught? The question seems to invite skeptical replies. The poet Theodore Roethke insisted that writing can't be taught; it can only be "insinuated." And Wallace Stegner said that writing can be taught--but not to everybody. Now we'll hear your thoughts on whether writing can be taught.