Do you have bad writing habits? We all do. Of course, some may be worse off than others, with patterns that make their work barely readable.
Bad writing habits are hard to break. Many of them, you’ll probably deny despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Once you’ve made peace with the fact that you need to make changes, though, here are a few things you should do.
1. Find out your weaknesses. Unless you know what you want to change, you can’t get on the road to improvement. Based on your past work, what traits of bad writing have you noticed? What do your editors, peers, readers and writing software tell you needs some stepping up?
2. Work on improving areas with the biggest potential gains. Got a list of bad habits you want to change? Arrange them according to how much potential gains each one can get you. Naturally, working on those that can make the most impact in your writing will net you the best results, so prioritize working on them at a conscious level.
3. Use practical solutions. Hokey magic techniques work well in the movies. Unfortunately, they don’t do so well in real life. For your sake, seek out practical, real-world solutions to the issues you discover. There are so many resources out there for writers – get on it.
4. Find a replacement habit. Habits are difficult to get rid of because they’re behavior. For many people, the only way to drop one is to replace it with something else. If you find yourself habitually finishing your pieces without a proper conclusion, you have to come up with an alternate action that eliminates it altogether, such as writing your ending right after finishing the introduction.
5. Try new things. Habits are difficult to break when you do the same things over and over. If you continually write one type of piece, do something else for a while. It could be all the overhaul you need.
Tags: bad habits, writing habits
