LifestyleEverything You Need To Know About Writing – A Beginner’s Guide

Everything You Need To Know About Writing – A Beginner’s Guide

One of the founding fathers of the United States once said, “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing”. This statement perfectly encapsulates what a writer should strive to achieve with their words or deeds.

Writing in the modern age is failing to match the golden standards of the bygone eras. This is ironic when we have access to everything at the touch of one click and yet our writing still suffers.

From assignments to emails to books and beyond, writing is an inevitable process that will do wonders for you if you learn to do it properly. The power of articulation can open the doors of opportunities for you but as a beginner, all this can be very daunting.

Join me as I take you with me on this journey to learn what all writers need to be doing to write something worth reading. Writing is an acquired skill that will require effort from your end to improve. Focus some of those efforts on revamping your environment as well…

Delving Deeper into Writing – A Novice’s Comprehensive Guide

1. Optional: Environment Matters

Why wouldn’t a peaceful environment be a top priority for any aspiring writer? Well, it’s optional because I’ve seen some supernatural beings (colleagues) write top-ranking articles while there’s a parade going on behind them.

I myself require the elimination of distractions for writing to my potential but I’ve seen writers make do with the environment they get. Things like clutter, noise, and divided attention due to distractions in the background all contribute to bad write-ups. You can set the environment to your liking to ensure you write to your full potential.

2. Breaking Down The Writing Process

Writing isn’t a one-step process. There are a lot of careful considerations and deliberations that go into the best-written works. A proper writing process is incomplete without the following steps:

  • Prewriting
  • Drafting
  • Revising
  • Editing
  • Proofreading

3. Prewriting

Prewriting is the initial stage of the writing process. You do not write during this phase rather gather intel on the topic you’re supposed to write for. Researching, brainstorming for ideas, and plans are all considered to be a part of prewriting.

The prewriting for this article you’re consisted of me gathering a few good quotes about writing and starting my article strong with one. I brainstormed ideas to start this article strong, and I came up with them.

My plan for this article is to provide demonstrations with real-life examples of writing. Google will be your best friend in this phase, and you will enjoy the company of chatbots. Then you can move on to the next phase of writing which is actually writing the stuff that you’ve planned and researched for.

4. Drafting

This stage is all about transforming your ideas into a rough writing draft. Rough in this case does not mean you purposely write poorly. It’s just that you follow the flow of writing that you think fits best in your scenario. Form sentences and paragraphs according to it.

It will be a bit redundant if I keep using this article as an example instead, here’s a rough draft of an article I got published on a blog.

You can see this rough draft of the article I’ve linked to above has 410 words. The original article clocks in at about 1100 words. This 410-word draft served as the foundation on which I wrote the other 700 words.

You can actually outsource the drafting process to reasoning engines if you want. My apologies if this goes against your modern sensibilities but everyone’s doing it or does it from time to time. You’re not forced to do it but it’s an option that’s worth mentioning in this guide.

5. Revising

Those 700 words aren’t all that I added. Revision includes making changes to the content that improve its overall clarity, coherence, and effectiveness. Nobody wants to read 2000 words or above write-ups if they’re not clear or concise.

This is clearly the hardest part of any writing endeavor you will take. You will need to add information, remove needless information, reorganize paragraphs for smooth formatting, select the best words, and rewrite sentences to improve the overall quality of writing.

A comprehensive guide for writing wouldn’t be whole without the mention of online tools to assist your beginner writing skills. Especially tools for rewriting sentences as that will be your biggest headache. Rewriting refers to rephrasing in your own wording without changing the original context or meaning.

A quintessential online tool will rewrite article and tackle the hardest part of the revising step for you. AI is a blessing for writers these days and it will continue assisting them in better ways in the future.

Below is an example of an AI rewriting tool that’s free to use and provides accurate rewrites in a timely manner. You are free to experiment with rewriting tools online, but this is my go-to choice whenever I need to rewrite my articles.

These tools aren’t just quick either, they improve coherence, flow, readability, clarity, and writing in general. You can count on these tools for assistance, but I wouldn’t recommend giving them the reigns to dictate your entire writing process. This is because of the fallacious results they can produce sometimes when dealing with big write-ups.

6. Editing

It’s time to go over your grammar, punctuation, spelling, and other issues of such nature. These are errors that everyone makes especially if the write-up is particularly long, and the writer has a habit of working really fast.

It can be the little things like comma splices, determiner errors, verb tense errors, etc. I still get mixed up on the spelling of “dependent” sometimes. It’s embarrassing but I’m still doing well for myself.

You can go over the entirety of your written work and fix these issues yourself or get online grammar checker tools to resolve this. They are fast and reliable, and some aren’t even bound by word limits. Just a little thing for your consideration otherwise you can fix it on your own.

7. Proofreading

This is the last stage before submitting/publishing your written work. In proofreading, you read your work thoroughly to catch any mistakes that slipped from your notice. This is the same step as editing except you don’t have a finished written piece on your hand in editing.

That “one last look” can save you from a boatload of trouble. I’ve learned over the years that in proofreading there can be a lot of inconsistencies that can affect your writing negatively in more than one way.

There are actually online proofreading tools much to my surprise. They are quite brilliant and ensure that your write-up is absolutely error-free and ready for submission, posting, or publication on time.

Conclusion

At last, after following the above steps, your writing process is complete. All that is needed now is submission. None of the steps that I mentioned are easy in any way in fact, just proofreading properly can sometimes consume hours of your day.

You can bypass the difficulty of the writing process by turning to online AI tools but where’s the charm in it? There’s no match or limit to a person’s own creativity but these tools do help to speed along the process and in today’s world that’s all that matters.

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