Welcome to the first article in our ‘Writing Tips for Scriptophobics’ series. We know that writing is one of those things that can break the most accomplished marketing director into a cold sweat, so we wanted to assuage your distress by providing practical advice on common mistakes many people make when trying to scribe cogent copy. We hope this series will not only alleviate writing stress, but actually make it an enjoyable practice and cure your writing phobia.
Our first topic and one that has frozen the fingers of many budding writers over time is that of self-editing while writing. This lexical limitation is rooted in a desire for perfection. It’s that little voice in your mind whispering unproductive criticisms like, “No one will want to read this drivel”, or “That’s not the right way to say that”. This toxic mental berating has no place in the writer’s mind and can easily be quashed when using some simple techniques. Pour it onto the page One trick to overriding self-editing and internal criticism in your writing is to pour all of your knowledge about your chosen topic onto the page from the outset. If you worry about superfluous rules such as spelling, word choice or punctuation in the early stages, your creative flow will be stifled, leaving you staring at the heart-shaped foam art of your accompanying latte . When you spill it onto the page in a format that can be easily broken into clear sections for editing and rearranging later, you’ll have more than enough material to either scale back or augment with research and quotes, resulting in a polished and informed piece of prose. One thing to avoid while using this technique is getting too attached to the mass of writing that you’ve purged. The idea is to confidently remove what’s not needed and select the gems from the rubbish, change common verbiage into more poignant and original semantics, use your spellchecker and make corrections, read your work aloud to see if it sounds natural. Prepare an outline If you find the devil-may-care technique of purging a little, well, reckless, another way to battle the writer’s block is to dedicate time to outlining the structure of your piece prior to actually writing it. Though an obvious technique that you probably learned in school , this method is commonly overlooked due to our time-poor lives and the urgency in fulfilling rigorous commitments. Just like writing a speech or an essay, your outline should detail a definitive beginning, middle and end. That is, tell them what you're going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them. You don’t have to be as regimented as that, but the gist is that your piece should have a natural flow, one that carries the reader from one paragraph to the next in a seamless order that makes sense. Your outline should be the framework from which you’ll elaborate with more detailed information and distinct language. Headings should be followed by bullet points of topics to cover, leading to a precis of your conclusion in an organic manner of writing. When you’ve completed your outline, approach each section as an independent component of the piece, making sure that the last sentence of each paragraph acts as a direct segue to the next paragraph. If you stick to these simple rules, you’ll never be bereft of material. Keep an eye out for our next installment of Writing Tips for Scriptophobics soon, and remember this: "A word after a word after a word is power." --Margaret Atwood
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