The process of becoming a better writer can take a long time, and learning is essential to the journey. As shared by several English degree graduates, there is often no immediate vocational payoff with these programs. Rather, you get the foundation you need to continue practicing the craft before seeing success. Several writers have mentioned pursuing further studies or work experiences that allowed them to resonate with current literature and think critically for their next narrative. If you’re interested in becoming a better writer, here are some qualifications you should consider undergoing.

There are a lot of things to consider when hiring an editor, so here are eight tips to help you make the right decision.

Imagine someone telling you a story at a party. It would be a hilarious story—except that they suck at telling it. Their words are jumbled, and they’re so long-winded, and they messed up the punchline. It’s just a mess. This is what line editing fixes in your story.

Overwriting often happens with amateur writers. New writers think they need to explain everything to the reader for them to understand. This means there’s lots of meaningless description without much progression of the story. The reader is pulled out of the story and gets bored! So, let’s learn how not to do that!

You may think a quick spell-check (or a thorough one) and reading the document a hundred million times is a good replacement for hiring editors. You might even send it to friends and read editing blogs and do all kinds of other things to help you do a better job editing your own book . . . but it’s not the same. Hiring a professional editor is invaluable, and here’s why:

Language changes and develops with the people speaking it. We do not speak the same in 2022 as we did in 1622. Not even the same as we did fifty years ago! Conventions and meanings change. This means we may have been taught rules that are no longer important. And somehow, some of us have been taught things that were never rules in the first place.

I want to go through some of these grammar “rules” that aren’t rules at all so we can stop worrying about them.

A style sheet is basically a smaller style guide customized to each project. Style guides tell us the rules of English. The purpose of style guides is to ensure consistency throughout writing so we know what a piece of text is talking about. What if there wasn’t a single source telling us how to use a semicolon? I think; we’d use them; whenever we wanted. And it would be; confusing for everyone involved. So style guides are important.

Proper punctuation is really important! Today we will be learning about colons.

Punctuation can get really tricky! This post talks about how to use parentheses properly.

For authors, especially for self-publishers, writing well and writing fast are our bread and butter. If we cannot produce books, we don't make any money. And if we don't make any money, then writing is just a hobby.

For some people, that is just fine. Writing can be a hobby, and a very fulfilling one at that.

However, for the rest of us, if we want to make a living at writing books, we have to learn to write efficiently.

In this article, I will cover a few tips on how to do this.