10 Strategies For More Effective Writing

Want to connect with more readers? These strategies will make your writing more powerful.

Every day, 2 million blog posts hit the World Wide Web. That’s a shocking amount of written content, and it doesn’t account for press releases, scholarly articles , and other forms of writing. If you want your writing to stand out in this crowded online world, it needs to be strong.

Effective writers know that their craft requires skill, practice , and dedication. They also know how to use specific strategies to make their writing more polished and stronger overall. Here’s a breakdown of skills that you can embrace to become a stronger, more effective writer.

When you are finished here, check out our content writing practice exercises and get a head start on the competition.

1. Outline Your Work

Good writing is about more than just knowing where to place a comma or how to use adverbs appropriately. Effective writing also conveys thoughts in a clear way, and that starts with an outline. A good writer will create thoughts that flow together into a cohesive message. 

An outline serves as the basic backbone of your paper or article. It gives you the structure that you fill in with details. The outline keeps you organized and prevents you from going off on a rabbit trail.

Learn how to write a story outline

2. Know What Audience Wants

Good writers empathize with their audience’s hopes, fears, dreams , and frustrations. They pinpoint what their audience wants to learn or achieve. Or they seek to understand how their audience is entertained.

If you want to be a strong writer, make notes about your audience before you begin an article or blog post. This will guide your writing style, communication techniques, and even subject matter.

If you write non-fiction, it’s a good idea to conduct a writing survey.

3. Use a Strong Opening

Your first sentence is your chance to hook the reader and make them want to read. It must be strong. There are several ways to do this, including:

• Share a personal anecdote or story
• Give a surprising fact
• Establish a personal connection
• Create a sense of need in the reader

Get creative, but open strong.

4. Learn to Write Concisely

Another sign of effective writing is precision. Short, clear, punchy, and compact sentences are powerful. Rambling sentences lack power. 

Writers who get their point across in 10 words rather than rambling on for multiple sentences are strong writers. Unnecessary words jumble up the meaning and bore the reader.

How to Write Concisely 

One way to learn to write concisely is by learning about passive voice and active voice. Active voice construction places the action doer as the subject of the sentence. Passive voice takes the subject and makes it the object of the sentence. For example:

The teacher spoke to the students

This is the active voice. The teacher is doing the speaking.

Conversely:

The students were spoken to by the teacher.

In this sentence, the teacher is speaking, but the students take the subject spot in the sentence. It takes more words to convey the same meaning. This is not concise.

Master Self-Editing 

Often, conciseness comes in the editing stage. After you get your thoughts on paper, go back through your piece to see what you can cut. Many writers find areas to shorten their thoughts and make them more concise.

Before you can write concisely, you must know what you wish to say. Your outline will help with that.

Our self-editing checklist can help.

5. Avoid Common Grammar Errors

Good writers know their weak points. Learning to spot and fix common grammar errors will make you a better writer. Here are some to watch for:

• Sentence problems – Sentences can be run-ons, which stick two complete sentences together without punctuation or conjunctions, or fragments, which don’t complete the thought. Both are errors. A sentence needs a subject, predicate , and complete thought.
• Comma use – Commas are tricky. Good writers know when to use a comma, such as when joining two independent clauses with a conjunction or after introductory phrases. Read our guide to using commas.
• Subject/verb agreement – Subjects and verbs should agree in number. Plural subjects need plural verbs, as do singular subjects and verbs.
• Misplaced modifiers – Modifiers are words or phrases that modify another part of the sentence. If misplaced, they hurt clarity. The modifier needs to be placed near the word it modifies so the meaning remains clear.
• Verb tense – When writing, the tenses of the verb need to stay consistent throughout unless the meaning dictates a change. For example, if you are writing an essay about something that happened in the past, keep the verb past tense.
• Pronoun agreement – Like verbs, pronouns must agree with the nouns they represent. For pronouns, this agreement is gender and number. A man would only be replaced with he, him, and his, for example.

A good grammar checker can help

6. Choose Strong Verbs

Strong writing uses strong verbs. Write the most descriptive verb for the action. For instance, instead of saying:

He went to the store.

Say:

He drove to the store.

The verb drove tells more about the action than went. With went, the reader could picture walking or biking rather than driving.

Read our guide to revising sentences.

7. Use Adjectives and Adverbs Sparingly

Throwing an adjective or adverb into a sentence may feel like it’s beefing up the content, but strong writing is concise. Trying to improve flat, boring words with modifiers falls short. 

Adverbs like very or somewhat have little power. Instead, look for a more precise or interesting noun or verb.

To help, we’ve rounded up a list of common verbs.

8. Read Your Work Out Loud

When you complete the first draft, the real fun begins, editing. To help catch errors and wordiness, consider reading your draft out loud. 

When you hear your written work read out loud, you notice errors you glossed over when reading it silently. You catch places where the writing is unclear or overly wordy.

If it’s a longer piece, you can go one step further and record yourself reading it. Then, listen back to passages that sound odd. It can take several passes before reaching a final draft.

9. Use Effective Writing Tools

The Internet gives several tools to writers to help make a piece of writing stronger. The Hemingway App is one of these. Plugging your piece of writing into the Hemingway App shows you passive voice errors, wordy sentences, and overall readability. 

Use the app to target a specific reading level and make your main point clearer in the overall peace. For most audiences, you want a high school or lower reading level, and the Hemingway App shows you this quickly.

Grammarly is another such tool. Either through a plug-in on your browser or through the website directly, Grammarly offers powerful grammar-checking software that highlights grammar and spelling errors. It also homes in on word choice problems. This tool protects you from making glaring grammar errors that make your writing less effective.

Read our Grammarly review

10. Revise, Edit, and Proofread

Revising, editing and proofreading are all separate steps. First, revise the piece. Make sure your main idea is clear, and your writing is concise. This takes a big-picture view of a piece of writing and makes changes that make it stronger.

Next, edit the piece. Editing takes a smaller view of the piece to analyze each sentence for clarity, efficiency, and grammar. This is where you focus on punctuation and spelling mistakes.

Finally, proofread. This is a final read-through of the piece before publication. This gives you the chance to find errors you missed when editing. It also lets you check for stylistic errors if you need to match a particular style guide.

Claim our self-editing checklist.

The Final Word on Effective Writing

Effective writers know that writing isn’t a fast process. It takes time and work to master the craft. Write a little every day, work on specific parts of your craft and press publish early and often. By learning these steps and applying them every time you write, you can become a better writer.