Want to practice writing? Then sit down and write. That’s really all there is to it.
Of course, many of us will try to do that and end up staring blankly at our computer screens. Some will end up hitting Firefox and heading over to Facebook instead. Me, I end up watching YouTube. For some reason, practice just never works out the way it’s supposed to.
That’s why you need writing exercises for practice the same way you need a proofreading software for your editing stages. Here are a couple of my favorites:
Expanding non-descript words
Words that supposedly say something but really don’t are among my personal pet peeves. Take terms like “nice,” “excellent” and “awesome,” for instance. What the heck do they really mean?
To train yourself in eschewing these non-descript words in favor of more colorful descriptions, try to find a piece of your writing that uses them unsparingly. Find all the phrases you’ve put together that suffer through it, such as “an awesome car,” “gorgeous weather” and “shoes are quite nice.”
Pick them out and rewrite them, this time detailing what the non-descript words refer to. What’s so awesome about the car? Why is the weather gorgeous? How does a pair of shoes qualify as quite nice?
Creating Powerful Images
This next one is a neat trick to coming up with powerful writing imagery. Draw two columns on a piece of paper. On one side, write a list of twenty tangible nouns (e.g. river, house, machine); on the other, write twenty intangible (aka abstract) nouns (e.g. justice, progress, dreams). Randomly take one word from each column and combine them in an “a..of” phrase, ending up with statements such as “a house of justice,” “a machine of progress” and “a river of dreams.” Sure, some of them will sound lame, but you’ll also end up with some powerful imagery.
