The freedom of self expression facilitated by the Internet has turned many people into writers. For some of these e-age writers, writing is a creative exercise that enables them to spread their thoughts and ideas. While others take-up writing simply because it is a great way of promoting ones business on the Internet.
Here, I’ll discuss some writing guidelines that’ll enable amateur writers to enhance the quality and professionalism of their content. The intention is to enable amateur writers (who are already doing a great job) to write even better.
The guidelines can be enumerated as follows:
Make your content as simple as flowing water
Check for logical errors
Detect implicational errors
Making the content as simple as flowing water
A write-up (be it an essay, article, letter etc.) is essentially a sequence of thoughts and ideas. So, you can enhance the reader-friendliness of your content by ensuring that the ideas are sequenced correctly, and the relationship between consecutive ideas is well defined. This will help your readers to understand how one idea leads to another – making the content seem like flowing water. In order to give your content a good flow, you must step into your readers’ shoe and gain an insight into their level of knowledge on the subject (that you are writing about). This will enable you to string your thoughts and ideas into a self contained narrative that provides the right amount of background information where necessary. It is also important to use appropriate sentence connectors, so that idea transition becomes apparent.
Checking for logical errors
Logical errors are nothing but malformed inferences resulting due to improper reasoning. In other words, these are wrongly deduced thoughts and ideas which either mislead or confuse the reader. Here’s an example:
Ours is an emerging name in the industry of information technology as we are engaged in offering reliable and timely IT Services to our clients.
This sentence communicates a wrong idea, because it isn’t right to claim that the company (in question) is an emerging one, just because it provides reliable and timely service to its clients. Removing logical errors from a write-up is a tricky business, which calls for an in-depth critical review of the entire draft. Basically, you’ll have to ponder upon each sentence to determine the validity of its logic.
Detecting implicational errors
An implicational error occurs when a sentence or a paragraph fails to communicate the intended idea, resulting in a disparity between what people make of it and what the writer actually meant by it. Here’s an example:
A content-rich website can create a marked difference in its ability to bring in more traffic.
In this case, the focus of the idea is not very clear, because the sentence is structured inappropriately. The idea becomes comprehensible when the sentence is rephrased in the following manner.
A content-rich website is capable of attracting greater traffic.
It is very difficult for a writer to detect implicational errors in his own writing. So, if you are copy-editing your own work, then it is better to carry-out the final review at least a day after completing the writing job. This ensures that you are in a frame-of-mind quite similar to that of your readers, and therefore you are more likely to detect implicational errors.
Incorporating these guidelines in your writing process will require some amount of practice. But, once you have successfully adopted them, your writing will acquire a smooth flow and will easily be understood by your readers.
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Chillibreeze's disclaimer: This is a contributed article and was published on Chillibreeze in September, 2011. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of Chillibreeze as a company. Chillibreeze has a strict anti-plagiarism policy. Please contact us to report any copyright issues related to this article. The relevance of the facts and figures cited (if any) could change after a period of time.
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—About our writer:
Huzefa is the chief conceptualizer at Kontriga, a copywriting and instructional design company based in Kolkata – India. He’s been involved in marketing & communication since 2007, and has worked extensively in the field of promotional communication and instructional design.
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