In this collection of writing tips, you will find rare gems for both fiction and non-fiction writing from the finest writers, who have over the years mastered, refined, and taught the art of writing.
I have presented the tips as it is, without paraphrasing, without subjectivising them.
The writing tips cover many aspects related to the art of writing: creative writing, copywriting, digital writing, form & substance, creativity, style, storytelling, grammar, methods of writing, etc.
I have used 21 writing manuals to compile the list. Check out the list, if you wish to explore more in detail. The list of manuals is given below:
- Sense of Style by Steven Pinker
- The Elements of Style by William Strunk
- The Portable MFA in Creative Writing
- Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande
- The Gotham Writer’s Workshop
- Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin
- The Writer’s Workbook by Newman, Cusick & La Tourette
- The New Oxford Guide to Writing by Thomas S. Kane
- Stein on Writing
- The Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing
- The Creative Writing Course Book by Julia Bell and Paul Magrs
- On writing — by Stephen King
- Ernest Hemingway on Writing
- On writing well — by William Zinsser
- Bird by Bird — by Anne Lamott
- Nobody wants to read your shit by Steven Pressfield
- Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday
- This book will teach you how to write better by Neville Medhora
- Writing Tools — by Roy Peter Clark
- The boron letters by Gary Halbert
- Dreyer’s English by Benjamin Dreyer
Let’s start!
1. Linger over good writing wherever you find it and reflect on what makes it good.
2. The deliberate use of surprising transitions — colons, dashes, block quotations — is one of the hallmarks of lively prose.
3. A writer, like a cinematographer, manipulates the viewer’s perspective on an ongoing story, with the verbal equivalent of camera angles and quick cuts.
4. An insistence on fresh wording and concrete imagery over familiar verbiage and abstract summary
5. Write as if you have something important to show.
6. Which simulation should a writer immerse himself in when composing a piece for a more generic readership, such as an essay, an article, a review, an editorial, a newsletter, or a blog post? The literary scholars Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner have singled out one model of prose as an aspiration for such writers today. They call it classic style, and explain it in a wonderful little book called clear and simple as the Truth.
7. The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader’s gaze so that she can see it for herself. The purpose of writing is presentation, and its motive is disinterested truth. It succeeds when it aligns language with the truth, the proof of success being clarity and simplicity.
8. The writer knows the truth before putting it into words; he is not using the occasion of writing to sort out what he thinks.
9. Nor does the writer of classic prose have to argue for the truth; he just needs to present it.
10. Writer of classic prose must simulate two experiences: showing the reader something in the world, and engaging her in conversation.
11. The metaphor of showing implies that there is something to see. The things in the world the writer is pointing to, then, are concrete: people (or other animate beings) who move around in the world and interact with objects. The metaphor of conversation implies that the reader is cooperative.
12. Classic style is not a contemplative or romantic style, in which a writer tries to share his idiosyncratic, emotional, and mostly ineffable reactions to something.
13. Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius.
14. As with the celebrity chef: the messy work has been done beforehand and behind the scenes.
15. Classic style minimizes abstractions, which cannot be seen with the naked eye.
16. Avoid Nominalization rule that takes a perfectly spry verb and embalms it into a lifeless noun by adding a suffix like –ance, –ment, –ation, or –ing.
17. Keep in mind the guiding metaphor of classic style: a writer, in conversation with a reader, directs the reader’s gaze to something in the world.
18. Curse of Knowledge: a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know.
19. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose. It simply doesn’t occur to the writer that her readers don’t know what she knows — that they haven’t mastered the patois of her guild, can’t divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention, have no way to visualize a scene that to her is as clear as day. And so she doesn’t bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the necessary detail.
20. A third of our brains are dedicated to vision, and large swaths devoted to touch, hearing, motion, and space. For us to go from “I think I understand” to “I understand,” we need to see the sights and feel the motions.
21. Show a draft to yourself, ideally after enough time has passed that the text is no longer familiar.
22. Principles of style that apply within a sentence, such as placing given before new information, apply to extended passages as well.
23. Coherence begins with the writer and reader being clear about the topic.
24. It’s essential to let the reader in on the topic early.
25. The reader needs to know whether a writer is rabbiting on about a topic in order to explain it, convey interesting new facts about it, advance an argument about it, or use it as an example of an important generalization. In other words, a writer has to have both something to talk about (the topic) and something to say (the point).
26. Work with the ongoing newsreel in readers’ minds and describe events in chronological order: She showered before she ate is easier to understand than She ate after she showered.
27. You only live once should be rewritten as You live only once, with only next to the thing it quantifies, once.
28. “We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy but because it is hard.” That sounds a lot classier than “We don’t choose to go to the moon because it is easy but because it is hard.” Not “We don’t choose to go to the moon because it is easy.”
29. There is nothing wrong with beginning a sentence with a coordinator. and, because, but, or, so, also.
30. They take part in a kind of notional agreement. No man and any girl are grammatically singular but psychologically plural: they pertain to classes with many individuals.
31. You could change Everybody began to have their vexation to They all began to have their vexations.
32. Every writer should shorten their sentences is easily transformed into All writers should shorten their sentences or just Writers should shorten their sentences.
33. The other escape hatch is to replace the pronoun with an indefinite or generic alternative and count on the reader’s common sense to fill in the referent: Everybody began to have their vexation becomes Everybody began to have a vexation, and Every dinosaur should look in his or her mirror becomes Every dinosaur should look in the mirror.
34. Commas set off a phrase that is not an integral constituent of the sentence, and which as a result is not essential to understanding its meaning.
35. Susan visited her friend Teresa tells us that it’s important for us to know that Susan singled out Teresa as the person she intended to visit. If Susan visited her friend, Teresa, it’s only significant that Susan visited a friend (oh, and by the way, the friend’s name is Teresa).
36. A comma also signals a prosodic break: a slight pause in pronunciation.
37. Not only are commas partly regulated by prosody, but until recently that was their principal function. Writers used to place them wherever they thought a pause felt natural, regardless of the sentence’s syntax:
38. One comma mistake is so common: using a comma to join two complete sentences, each of which could stand on its own.
39. As for names ending in s like Charles and Jones, go with grammatical logic and treat them as the singulars they are: Charles’s son, not Charles’ son. Some manuals stipulate an exception for Moses.
40. Quotation marks signal that the author is not using words to convey their usual meaning but merely mentioning them as words.
41. If you really want to improve the quality of your writing, the principles you should worry about the most are critical thinking and factual diligence. First, look things up. Much of our conventional wisdom consists of friend-of-a-friend legends. Try to restrict the things you write to things that are true. If you are making a factual claim, it should be verifiable.
42. If you’re making a moral argument — a claim about what people ought to do — you should show how doing it would satisfy a principle or increase a good that reasonable people already accept.
43. Most of our ideas are so crude that we can make more progress by analyzing and refining them than by pitting them against each other in a winner-take-all contest.
44. Chew on one thinker — writer, artist, activist, role model — you really love. Study everything there is to know about that thinker. Then find three people that thinker loved, and find out everything about them.
45. Repeat this as many times as you can. Climb up the tree as far as you can go. Once you build your tree, it’s time to start your own branch.
46. The best advice is not to write what you know; it’s to write what you like. Write the kind of story you like best — write the story you want to read.
47. The same principle applies to your life and your career: Whenever you’re at a loss for what move to make next, just ask yourself, ‘What would make a better story?’
48. The manifesto is this: Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use — do the work you want to see done.
49. If you’re out of ideas, wash the dishes. Take a really long walk. Stare at a spot on the wall for as long as you can.
50. In this age of information abundance and overload, those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out, so they can concentrate on what’s really important to them.
51. The way to get over a creative block is to simply place some constraints on yourself. It seems contradictory, but when it comes to creative work, limitations mean freedom. Write a song on your lunch break.
52. Paint a painting with only one colour. Start a business without any start-up capital. Shoot a movie with your iPhone and a few of your friends. Build a machine out of spare parts. Don’t make excuses for not working — make things with the time, space, and materials you have, right now.
53. It was only when I had a genuine desire to communicate or learn something meaningful in a new language that I was able to learn.
54. Your studies will be much more enjoyable and effective if you read or listen to aspects of the new culture that attract you or subjects that you need to learn about. Seeking out meaningful content is your first step.
55. To continue to progress in language learning you just need to listen, read, and learn words and phrases every day. It is that simple.
56. Concentrate on learning the language from content that matters to you and interests you.
57. Pursue your own needs and interests, rather than an externally imposed program.
58. If you control your learning, you will learn faster.
59. Heinrich Schliemann was able to express his thoughts orally and in writing after about six weeks of self-study. His method consisted of “reading a great deal aloud without making a translation, taking a lesson every day, constantly writing essays upon subjects of interest, correcting these under the supervision of a teacher, learning them by heart, and repeating in the next lesson what was corrected on the previous day.”
60. The only reason children are “better language learners” is that they are less afraid to make mistakes, and they get more practice.
61. Pay attention to the micro to get the macro.
62. A lot of success in life and business comes from knowing what you want to avoid: early death, a bad marriage, etc.
63. “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time — none, zero.”
64. The acquisition of knowledge is a moral duty. You must be a lifelong learner.
65. Go deeper than anybody else — that’s how you’ll get ahead.
66. “The active voice is usually more direct and vigorous than the passive:
I shall always remember my first visit to Boston.
This is much better than:
My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me .
67. As a rule, it is better to express even a negative in positive form.
1. not honest
Dishonest
2. not important
Trifling
68. “Prefer the specific to the general, the definite to the vague, the concrete to the abstract.
A period of unfavourable weather set in.
It rained every day for a week.
69. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell.”
70. “A common violation of conciseness is the presentation of a single complex idea, step by step, in a series of sentences or independent clauses which might to advantage be combined into one.
Macbeth was very ambitious. This led him to wish to become king of Scotland. The witches told him that this wish of his would come true. The king of Scotland at this time was Duncan. Encouraged by his wife, Macbeth murdered Duncan. He was thus enabled to succeed Duncan as king. (51 words.)
Encouraged by his wife, Macbeth achieved his ambition and realized the prediction of the witches by murdering Duncan and becoming king of Scotland in his place. (26 words.)”
71. “Interesting. Avoid this word as a perfunctory means of introduction. Instead of announcing that what you are about to tell is interesting, make it so.
72. The idea that creative endeavour and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.
73. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.
74. Remember that the basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colourful.
75. Avoid adverbs.
76. The best form of dialogue attribution is said.
77. There should be lots of short paragraphs and white space in an easy-to-read book.
78. I am approaching the heart of this book with two theses, both simple. The first is that good writing consists of mastering the fundamentals (vocabulary, grammar, and the elements of style) and then filling the third level of your toolbox with the right instruments. The second is that while it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.
79. If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.
80. The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.
81. Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other.
82. Writers must therefore constantly ask: what am I trying to say? Surprisingly often they don’t know. Then they must look at what they have written and ask: have I said it? Is it clear to someone encountering the subject for the first time?
83. Try to avoid all words that end in “-ly”.
84. Simplify, simplify.
85. Soon after you confront the matter of preserving your identity, another question will occur to you: “Who am I writing for?”
86. You are writing for yourself.
87. Never say anything in writing that you wouldn’t comfortably say in conversation.
88. You learn to write by writing. It’s a truism, but what makes it a truism is that it’s true. The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.
89. Ask yourself some basic questions before you start. For example:
· In what capacity am I going to address the reader? (Reporter? Provider of information? Average man or woman?)
· What pronoun and tense am I going to use? What style?” (Impersonal reportorial? Personal but formal? Personal and casual?)
· What attitude am I going to take toward the material? (Involved? Detached? Judgmental? Ironic? Amused?)
· How much do I want to cover? What one point do I want to make?
90. As for what point you want to make, every successful piece of nonfiction should leave the reader with one provocative thought that he or she didn’t have before.
91. The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn’t induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead.
92. Therefore your lead must capture the reader immediately and force him to keep reading. It must cajole him with freshness, or novelty, or paradox, or humour, or surprise, or with an unusual idea, or an interesting fact, or a question.
93. Next, the lead must do some real work. It must provide hard details that tell the reader why the piece was written and why he ought to read it. But don’t dwell on the reason. Coax the reader a little more; keep him inquisitive.
94. One moral of this story is that you should always collect more material than you will use.
95. Another moral is to look for your material everywhere, not just by reading the obvious sources and interviewing the obvious people.
96. Knowing when to end an article is far more important than most writers realize. You should give as much thought to choose your last sentence as you did to your first. Well, almost as much.
97. The perfect ending should take your readers slightly by surprise and yet seem exactly right. They didn’t expect the article to end so soon, or so abruptly, or to say what it said. But they know it when they see it. Like a good lead, it works.
98. The surprise is the most refreshing element in nonfiction writing. If something surprises you it will also surprise — and delight — the people you are writing for, especially as you conclude your story and send them on their way.
99. Little qualifiers:
Prune out the small words that qualify how you feel and how you think and what you saw: “a bit”, “a little”, “sort of”, “kind of”, “rather”, “quite”, “very”, “too”, “pretty much”, “in a sense” and dozens more.
They dilute your style and your persuasiveness.
100. Mood changers:
Learn to alert the reader as soon as possible to any change in mood from the previous sentence.
Shivam Pandey is a professional content & copywriter with 6+ years of experience. He specializes in writing on technology, business, digital marketing, lifestyle, travel, etc. He works closely with B2C and B2B businesses providing web content & copywriting services.