Home Interested Things The complete guide to taking your writing style to the next level.

The complete guide to taking your writing style to the next level.

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We believe that advancing your writing style is like your personal signature on your assignments hence you should pay special attention to it if you want to excel in your academic assignments. By advancing your academic writing style, you enhance your ability to present your ideas coherently and clearly. This post will discuss tips from our custom essay writing service that will help you to sharpen your writing style so that you can improve your overall writing proficiency.

Use the active voice

To boost your writing style, use the active voice as opposed to the passive one. In as much as it is not a grammatical crime to use the passive voice when it is necessary, make it a habit to avoid it as much as possible. When you fill your writings with active words, you make it more interesting and lively for your readers to read them. In addition, you make your writings clearer without leaving your reader trying to guess who did what in that particular sentence.

Do not use words you don’t know

If you want to enhance your writing style, you should keep off the temptation of trying to use words you don’t know. Many students fall into this trap and end up mixing their writings. When you use terms that you are unfamiliar with, you make it difficult for your reader to understand how that term fits in the context of what you are writing. By the time they have stumbled upon five such terms, be sure that your examiners will be infuriated and give you lower grades. If you don’t know it, avoid it.

Vary your sentence structure and length

In all forms of writing, sentences are the primary tools for conveying your thoughts to your reader hence you need to pay attention to the way you structure them.  If you structure them shoddily, you will be obscuring the only channel of passing sense to your audience. You need to make sure that you use varied sentence structure and length to convey your ideas.

You need to create a balance so that you do not end up in any of these extremes. For instance, in the process of trying to avoid long sentences, do not end up writing sentences that are too short as if you have run out of space.

Do not try to use “kindergarten brevity” sentence lengths like “I am happy, I hate porridge, Dad is coming…” At college level, you are writing to a mature and tertiary level audience, and if you limit your sentences to a ten-word limit, you will end up with too many incomplete sentences. If you need to use a short sentence, make sure that completeness and clarity take precedence over length. In writing, brevity is not a goal in itself if it will compromise the flow of your paragraphs and ideas.

On the other hand, you should also balance and use long sentences when it is necessary. The only thing you need to pay attention to is ensuring you do not make your sentences too long, and when you use them, don’t use too many of them.

So, make sure that you use short, medium, and long sentences to create a balance and harmony. This way, your readers will find your writings more interesting and diverse.

Don’t be repetitive

When it comes to writing, repetition is not a virtue. You need to ensure that you avoid repeating words and ideas in your writings. You need to check your work to ensure that you vary your terms even when you are expressing the same idea. To do this, you need to widen your vocabulary. For example, if you want to avoid repeating the word “children,” you can use its variations such as “descendants or offspring.”

Keep your language formal

All academic writing is formal, and you need to approach it as such. To keep your style more forceful, you need to keep off the trap of using informal language. One of the reasons why you need to keep off slang is that slang words vary depending on the geographical area of their usage. For instance, some slang words are peculiar to some areas, and if you use them universally, you may end up making it difficult for your readers to understand your message.

Write to express yourself and not to impress the reader

Another way of advancing your writing style is keeping to the goal of writing, which is to express yourself. If you drift from the goal of expressing yourself, you will end up writing to impress your readers. But what is wrong with writing to impress? When you write to impress, you end up in the following trap:

  • You lose focus on the needs and expectations of your readers because your desire to impress will override everything
  • You will wander into trivia
  • You will end up using too much information that the reader does not need because you want to impress them with how much you know
  • You will repeat yourself
  • You will end up using many “big” and irrelevant words that only help to complicate your writing

Use balanced paragraphs

Using balanced paragraphs is another way of advancing your writing style. Just as it is with sentences, you should use varied lengths to express your ideas. Do not fall into the trap of using one level of length throughout your writings. Use short, medium, and long paragraphs.

Read widely

To improve your writing style, you need to be a good reader. If you take time to read how other people are styling their writings, you will be exposed to better ways of writing. This way, you will expose yourself to new ideas and see through your own personal inadequacies. By discovering your personal shortcomings and learning from other people’s strengths, you stand higher chances of making necessary adjustments and improving your own writing style.

Join smaller sentences

Another way of making your writing style more appealing and effective is to avoid using too many small sentences to express the same idea or thought. Look at these two examples:

“Jane came. She looked at the condition. In deep sorrow and sympathy, she shook her head and walked away from the scene. She was deeply moved.”

In this example, all these four sentences are grammatically complete and correct. However, you can rewrite the same sentences into one complete sentence that captures the whole essence of the four. Take a look at this.

“Jane came and looked at the condition, shook her head and walked away from the scene being filled deep sorrow and sympathy.”

In the second example, you can see that one medium sentence has captured the essence of four short sentences without leaving out any idea.

Learn how to use punctuations well

If you misuse punctuations, you can confuse your readers and burry your message in ambiguity. Look at these two examples.

Let’s, eat my son

Let’s eat, my son

The first sentence shows a cannibal inviting people to share a meal she made from her son.

The second sentence clearly shows a mother or father inviting their son to eat.

Closing remarks

You are now abreast with tips that can help you to advance your writing style. You now have the power in your hands to take your efficiency to the next level.