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Here’s my top writing tip: visualise the person reading your article; they’re busy, suffering from information overload, and will skim read your article. Your reader wants to know why it's worth their time to keep reading.
To keep them reading, here are two more writing tips (each with a couple of suggestions):
Spend 50% of your writing time planning your article
+ Make sure you define the article’s purpose: To convince? To inform? To entertain? …
+ Do a brain-dump or mind-map of everything you want to write about in this article.
+ Summarise your post or article into four short bullet points before you start.
Make your article easy to read and understand
+ Put your main point at the front; don’t make the reader work to discover your magnificent conclusion (assume they’ll quit reading before they reach the end of your article).
+ Say what you want to say using the simplest but most precise words possible.
(Tips condensed down from a course I did a few years ago.)
2 comments:
"Put your main point at the front; don’t make the reader work to discover your magnificent conclusion (assume they’ll quit reading before they reach the end of your article)"
This is the role of the abstract in science... You need to be able to condense your paper, poster or talk into <200 words :-) Teaches concise though not necessarily elegant!
Planning! No wonder SOPs and SMOUs have been taking me so long... I think of them as straight-forward so don't bother to plan!
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