How to practice writing

Image by David Schwarzenberg from Pixabay

This article was originally published on Medium, but I thought that it would fit nicely here on DEV because many of us are not just developers, but also writers.

There is a popular saying - 'practice makes perfect', and I completely agree with it. If you repeat an activity for 10, 100, 1000 times, you are certainly going to get good at it eventually. The same principle applies to writing, too. If you write once every day, you are going to be a better writer than if you had been writing once every week or not at all. Practice certainly helps you improve. So if you want to become a good writer - practice. Practice every day, or practice every week - it doesn't matter - go at your own pace that feels comfortable to you.

But how do you practice writing? That is the topic of this article. In this article we will explore some common and effective ways how you can practice your writing to become a better writer, and what aspect of writing each method helps you improve. The methods will focus on improving your article writing skills as opposed to story writing or any other type of writing. But worry not, as these methods can be applied to any type of writing.

So let's dive in!

Table of Contents

1. Reading
2. Freewriting
3. Rewriting others' work in your own words
4. Participating in writers' communities
5. Keeping a diary/journal

Reading

The first method doesn't actually involve any writing, ironically. Here is a quote from the popular American writer Stephen King:

"if you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.ˮ - Stephen King

Reading is a very effective way to improve your writing skills. It improves you in every aspect of writing - grammar, vocabulary, originality. But be picky about what you read. Every person's writing habits are more or less a sum of all the work that they have read in the past. So what you read will be what you will write. That is why it's important to carefully choose what you read, as it will reflect on your writing.

Reading improves you not just as a writer, but as a person - it helps you develop your perspective and helps you gain knowledge.

Read books, read magazines, read newspaper's - doesn't matter, as long as you read. It is a good idea to read a bit on a topic before starting to write about it.

Freewriting

Freewriting is the act of 'brainstorm-writing', where you write something spontaneously without having thought about it beforehand.

This type of writing improves your idea making skills and critical thinking. (In regards to writing, critical-thinking means that you can quickly come up with original and fitting paragraphs).

When freewriting, don't worry about the outcome of your writing - don't worry about grammar, spelling mistakes, etc. The goal of freewriting isn't to improve your grammar, but to improve your originality, so grammar doesn't matter here.

Freewriting improves you not just in the area of writing, but in general. It helps you develop your creative skills and critical thinking, which you can apply not just to writing, but to pretty much anything in life. Here is an informative article from Grammarly on freewriting.

Rewriting others' work in your own words

This is my favorite one, and I do it the most often. Paraphrasing others' work is a rewarding way of practicing writing and at the same time learning something new. When you rewrite others' work, you learn to extract key information from content, which is especially useful if you're writing informative articles. There are some things to keep in mind though:

• Don't plagiarize. This is very important. Taking someone else's work and passing it as your own is seen as taboo and frowned upon in the writers' community.
• Don't blatantly copy. If you copy someone's work word-by-word, you won't learn anything new. The advantage of rewriting someone's work is that you learn to extract information from it, which you won't learn if you just copy word-by-word.

Do note that in some cases, it is considered plagiarism even if you paraphrase someone's work. In cases where the article presents original ideas and concepts not seen anywhere else, it is considered plagiarism even to paraphrase the article. So be careful what you paraphrase.

Participating in writers' communities

There are many writers' communities, both in the real world and on the internet. Participating in these communities and their events and activities will definitely help you improve your writing skills. You will get a chance to collaborate with others and learn from them. You can find your local or online communities by searching for them on Google. Some notable online writing communities include:

• Writing Prompts subreddit on Reddit.com. On this subreddit, people post their prompts and writers try to write a story according to these prompts.
• Writing subreddit on Reddit.com. This is a general subreddit where people discuss their writing tools, techniques, ideas and more.

There are many more communities online that you can find with a simple Google search.

Keeping a diary/journal

Keeping a journal is a good way to practice writing because you will do it every day. Keeping a journal and writing into it regularly will reinforce your habit of writing, which will make you a better writer because, as we discussed earlier, practice makes perfect. Write down your activities, plans and thoughts.

Keeping a journal is a bit similar to freewriting because you don't think too much ahead of what you write, except that you usually write into a journal regularly and the content is a bit more structured/clean.

Conclusion

In this article we explored some ways how one can practice and improve their writing skills. I hope you learned something from this article and I hope that these methods will help you become a better writer. Do you have a practice method that wasn't mentioned in this article? Let me know in the comments!

Thank you so much for reading!