Read, rewrite, revise, and edit. Make your work the best it can be.

My little sister is a busy woman. She’s a photographer, a part-time novelist, a dedicated housewife, and a mother of two active little girls. She somehow finds time in all that to read voraciously, and even to blog sporadically. A couple weeks ago those last two activities overlapped a little bit when she wrote a blog post about the hundred books she’d read in 2009. Then, to her great surprise, one of the authors on the list commented on her blog!

She was ecstatic. She called to let me know about it, and I went to read the post in question, and right away I winced. One of her favorite authors found her blog, and found it all riddled with terrible writing. I’d have been mortified. To be fair, I’m easily mortified and she’s got a pretty forgiving audience. More importantly, she’s got better things to do with her time than policing passive voice.

Still, her big brother is a writing professor now, so I had to lecture her about it. I met her for dinner and said, “It’s time for you to start taking your writing seriously. It’s time for you to start proofreading!”

She just frowned and said, “But I do! That’s the thing. I don’t know how to make it better!”

Start with Style

One of the most important things you can do to improve your writing is to have paid attention back in high school. Unfortunately that requires an incredibly awkward verb tense and a time machine, so it’s not really a great solution. More to the point, it requires a perspective and sense of judgment you probably didn’t have in high school, because unless you’re writing academic papers, you’re probably much better off ignoring some of those grammar rules.

The thing is, there’s a big difference between ignoring the rules and being ignorant of them. All those stupid lessons you glossed over in high school exist for real, concrete reasons. If you know those reasons, you can make the occasional judgment call to break them. If you don’t really understand, though, you’re making that call with flawed judgment.

The nice thing is that real life doesn’t require you to go back and get an A in every high school class. Real life just requires you to learn the stuff that would actually be useful to you now. And there are resources out there to help with that. If you do well with textbooks, dig out your copy of The Little, Brown Handbook or Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Chances are good you’ve got one gathering dust on the bottom shelf of a bookcase somewhere, because those two books between them are some of the most informative and helpful instruction on English grammar ever written. Find one of those, dust it off, and start brushing up.

If you’d prefer a more casual tone, look around for articles or blog posts by grammarians like June Casagrande (author of the fun and funny Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies, which is effectively the Style Guide for UnstressedSyllables.com). It doesn’t have to be dry and didactic — pick a teacher whose style works for you. Do pick a teacher, though, and start learning all the rules you didn’t bother with before.

Read it in Stages

Once you know how to tell the difference between a verb and a participle, between singular subjects and plural conjugations — and, more importantly, why to care — it’s time to clean up your work. It’s always a good idea to reread anything you’ve written before publishing it to an audience (even if it’s just an email to your mom), and the more times you review it, the better it will be.

Carlos picked up on that back when he read my Works-in-Progress chart, but most experienced writers are in the habit of reviewing their work not only multiple times, but in multiple ways. As a novelist, I might dedicate one stage to fixing grammar, one stage to characterization, and another one to plot. If you’re still working on basics, you might dedicate one stage to fixing your verb tense — past, present, or future, it should be the same throughout your document — and another one to paragraph length and smooth transitions.

Whatever your problem areas are, consider dedicating at least one full mark-up to each.

Learn Your Weaknesses

Of course, before you can do that, you need to know what your problem areas are. Lucky for you, that’s the easy part.

Examine Your Blind Spots

I already recommended revisiting Elements of Style, but even if you never read anything but this blog, you’re studying writing. In the process, you’re going to come across references to rules you know nothing about, whether that’s subject/verb agreement or the proper use of subjunctive case. Even if you’re following the incredibly permissive style of Grammar Snobs, you’re occasionally going to stub your toe on some rule or technicality that you know nothing about.

When that happens, pay attention! Chances are good that rules you’ve never heard of are rules you’re breaking. Get in the habit of learning. There’s no better way to learn good writing techniques than to apply those techniques — again and again — to your own documents, especially when it’s work you actually care about.

Trust Your Ear

I do realize that getting you back to school is going to be a hard sell, and even if I’ve got you convinced, it isn’t going to do anything to help your writing now. If you want to instantly get better at editing and revising your own documents, I’ve got a one-step guaranteed method for you:

1. Read it out loud.

It’s easy to forget, living in one of the most literate societies the world has ever seen, but every written word is a direct representation of spoken language. It’s not a vague connection, it’s not even two different symbols both pointing to the same idea — written words are graphic representations of the spoken words (that ultimately point back to ideas).

Your readers jump through those hoops every time they glance at your document. A voice in their head converts all of your letters and symbols into sound, and then tries to build meaning out of it. It’s your job, as a writer, to direct that voice. It’s your job to manage not just the words on the page, but also the imagined sounds in your readers’ brains.

Does that sound intimidating? I guess it could, but at least it’s specific. What I’ve really said there is the same thing your English teachers tried to get across to you every time they scribbled “poor transitions” or “flow” or just “awkward” in your margins. What they were talking about was the difference between the ideas you’d put together, and the way those ideas sounded when read by the voice inside your teacher’s head.

So how to handle that? Commit your writing to voice. Read it out loud. I know you wrote it. I know you’re a competent reader. I know you probably struggled through the arduous process of learning how to read silently a long, long time ago, and that’s so much more convenient and efficient than reading aloud.

Do it anyway. Read your stuff out loud. You’ll hear grammar errors you can’t spot on the page. You’ll notice which words you use too often (or too close together). You’ll realize which sentences butt awkwardly against enough other, and need smooth transitions between them.

You’ll also slow down, and in the process you’ll catch a lot of easy mistakes you’d miss when reading silently — typos and word inversions and even homophone errors that are so easy to overlook when you’re speedreading.

Get Feedback

Of course, the best way to learn what your writing sounds like inside someone else’s head is to get that person to read it for you. When it comes right down to it, there’s no way for you to look at your document entirely objectively — you already know what the document is getting at, you know why you organized it the way you did, and you already possess all the information it’s trying to convey. To get a real analysis of its effectiveness, you have to hand it to someone else.

The good news is that there’s always someone willing to criticize anything you’re willing to care about (trust me, I’ve tested that claim extensively). Not all of them are going to be qualified critics or ideal readers, but everything they have to say is valuable, once you learn how to use it. (I’ll talk about that more on Thursday.)

In the meantime, search out those people who do give immediately helpful advice. Find the smartest, pickiest person in your target audience, and ask where your weaknesses are. Find a friend who really knows his or her stuff, and get some detailed markup. Lacking that, ask everyone for feedback, and look for consistent patterns.

When you know what’s wrong, you’re ready to make it better. Exactly how varies from case to case, writer to writer, audience to audience. That’s a lot of what I want to talk about here, though, and if you’ve got specific questions feel free to ask. Leave a message in the comments or send me an email, and let me know what you’d like to improve. I’ll help in any way I can.

A good bookend reflects the beginning....

I taught a Technical Writing course to a bunch of college kids last fall (stop me if you’ve heard this story). The purpose was to get them ready for the business writing they’d have to do in their professional careers, so I spent a semester teaching them about resumes and project proposals, memos and business letters, and before every class I’d put in hours figuring out my lecture. At every step of the way I wanted to make sure they understood all aspects of the documents they were working — when to use them, how to write them, why to care.

Then it came time for the final exam, and I had one of my brilliant ideas. Instead of giving them some big multiple-choice test, I decided to have them demonstrate, in a more practical way, the things they’d been learning all along. I told them a couple weeks in advance what to expect, then when the final exam period rolled around, I had them convert some assigned information into a clearly-defined document type (in this case, a wiki). The twist was that this time I wouldn’t tell them how. It was all up to them to figure it out.

I figured by that point they wouldn’t have any trouble. I’d shown them the process plenty of times. I’d dumped a ton of detailed examples on them, so I was confident my students could handle the challenge. So confident, in fact, that I didn’t do any preparation for that class period. I didn’t brush up on the wiki format, didn’t put together any general guidelines or notes…didn’t even really stop to consider all the things that could go wrong. I just showed up to class, told them where to find their source material and how much time they had to make me a wiki out of it, and then I sat down at my desk to watch brilliance happen.

You could have heard a pin drop in the silence that followed. I waited for them to sprint into action — or at least start talking it through — but no one moved. Sixteen pairs of eyes stayed fixed on me, waiting for the instructions I hadn’t bothered to prepare.

How to Write a Conclusion

How’s that for a happy ending? After fifteen weeks of teaching these kids — guiding them from total obliviousness through all the major topics, techniques, and types of technical writing — I got to their most important class (grade-wise), and my final, lasting impression, and let them fall flat on their faces.

How often have you made the same mistake, in your writing? You figured you’d explained the issue well enough in your introduction, you’d provided all of the relevant information in your body paragraphs. Your readers could figure it out, right? They’re all smart people. So what’s the point of laboring over a conclusion that’s probably not even necessary?

The point is to avoid those blank stares. The point is to drive your readers to action (not vague confusion). A good conclusion finishes the message you’ve been building throughout the document. It’s your last word to your students before they walk out that door forever. What are they going to think of you, and of what you’ve had to say?

The key to writing strong conclusions, just like good introductions, is to think about your readers. Consider their experience as they approach the end of your document, and tell them what they need to know to get the most out of your work.

Some Examples

How do you know what your readers need? A good writer takes some tips from his document type.

• If you’re writing a story, your reader needs resolution
• If you’re writing a humorous anecdote, your reader needs a punchline.
• If you’re writing a persuasive piece, your reader needs a call to action.
• If you’re writing an essay, your reader needs to know what’s the point.

More than that, your resolution should be a part of your overall document structure. It’s not a separate note tacked on to the end but an integral piece of the overall document design. In other words, you should be writing toward your resolution from the very beginning of the document.

The Conclusion in the Body

Think about your conclusion when you’re choosing your organization method. When you’re figuring out which supporting ideas you want to include in the body of your document, remember that your conclusion should flow out of those ideas, not just be a restatement of them.

That’s a common problem new writers have, and I hinted at it back when I introduced this series. If you find yourself asking, “Didn’t I already say all this?” go back and check the document body. Chances are good you already wrote the conclusion — as your final body point.

The problem with that is that you probably weren’t in “Conclusion Mode.” You were still dumping information, not guiding your reader to the end of your message. In that case, you’re going to need to either cut out that final point and rewrite it in your conclusion, or work on revising the body paragraph to make sure it does everything a conclusion needs to do.

The real way to make conclusions easier in the future is to learn how to write a document that supports a conclusion, and make sure the final bits end up in the right place. Learn to recognize the difference between supporting evidence and your argument’s point, and save that point to use as the meat of your document’s conclusion.

The Conclusion in the Intro

Of course, it’s not just about what you say, but also about how you say it. That’s part of what I meant when I talked about “Conclusion Mode.” There are some style tricks you can use to make sure your conclusion has the right feel for your reader. That’s almost as important as the information, creating a sense of closure and purpose to the overall document.

A call to action achieves that well, but one of the most powerful techniques for wrapping up a document smoothly is the callback — sometimes referred to as bookending — when you refer back to your introduction to tie your whole message into one cohesive bundle.

To do that well, you have to do it on purpose. Write an introduction that draws the reader in, but leave it open. Find ways to keep it in the reader’s mind throughout the body, so it’s still fresh when you turn back to it.

The End

That was my saving grace, in the Tech Writing final. I’d started out the first class by dividing them into groups, each specialized in certain aspects of documentation, and kept that up throughout the semester. On that last day, as quiet seconds stretched into awkward minutes, those groups suddenly pulled together. The guys on the back row figured out the system, the group on the left came up with a method, and the group on the right put it into practice. It took them the whole class period, but by the time it was over, they’d made something amazing.

When you do it right, sometimes the end just takes care of itself.