#1 Tip to Improve Writing FAST

hello welcome back to my channel my name is carly stevens i'm the author of the tanyon academy series which is all available the last one for uh for pre-order and this is english nerd so today as it is the end of the school year for a lot of schools some are already out i wanted to give my number one tip for how to improve your writing now there are obviously lots of ways to improve writing but this is the most reliable quickest most accessible way for anybody to improve their writing in my opinion now this goes for academic writing this goes for fiction writing this goes for college essays this goes for pretty much any kind of writing that i can think of and so and it's something that anybody can do with a little legwork so my number one tip for improving your writing fast is to be specific it sounds really simple um but if you are specific if you give a detail in place of a generality then it will make your fiction more compelling it will make your academic writing more persuasive it will have a world of effect on the writing that you have now so i'm just going to give you some examples one academic one college personal essay and one fiction just to illustrate how true this is so i'm going to start with the college essay kind of personal statement take this versus this okay option one soccer changed my life cool nothing wrong with it nothing that memorable about it either though which is kind of a problem when you're trying to stand out among other admission essays if that's what this is for now let's make that a lot more specific let's say that moment as a midfielder when my cleats dug into the grass as i sprinted after the ball showed me that grit could help me accomplish all of my goals and it felt really good that places the reader into the mindset that you were in as you played soccer and helps them truly understand what it was about your life that changed because of that experience so that is an example from a personal essay as far as fiction goes think about option one he looked very tired again nothing nothing inherently wrong with it nobody's going to say well that's grammatically incorrect or anything but contrast that with his heavy lids seemed to cast shadows on his lined cheeks now it's something that you can see it's something that you can experience and you can say oh man that guy is really tired instead of just being told what that is we get that specific information and suddenly comes alive to us this is even true in academic writing when you have an essay to write now my specialty is literary analysis essays so that's kind of where i'm going to be going with this example so you could say hamlet treats ophelia badly you could even add something like when hamlet is acting crazy he treats ophelia badly and that would just be okay but it's not going to be massively persuasive because it is pretty broad strokes that's something that you could have gotten from spark notes pretty easily so instead what you want to do is prove that you know what you're talking about by adding that specific detail so instead of saying that instead say something like hamlet treats ophelia badly when he acts crazy for example he goes into ophelia's room while she's sewing he's completely unkempt and stares at her as he grips her wrist terrifying her so much that she runs immediately to her father polonius now i'm thinking okay so you know what you're talking about and the chances that you'll get a better grade are almost guaranteed because you actually gave something specific rather than just a generality so if you get into the habit of making your writing more specific it doesn't even need to be that much longer all of my examples as you could see were longer than the original that's often going to be the case but not always basically if you can substitute a more general word for a specific one even that small change can make a huge difference in the overall impact of whatever you're writing so i hope that this was helpful for you it's something that anybody can do so just start getting into that habit no matter what kind of writer you are all right make sure to like this video if you like it don't forget to subscribe for more english nerdy goodness and i'll see you on monday bye

Channel: English Nerd

Views: 158

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: english nerd

Id: ZMFZ2xnbfjY

Length: 5min 8sec (308 seconds)

Published: Mon May 24 2021