This document provides many tips for better writing from various experts. Some key tips include: practicing writing regularly, reading your writing aloud and revising it, keeping language clear and concise by using short words and sentences, avoiding unnecessary words, and knowing your intended audience. Overall it emphasizes the importance of practice, revision, clarity and focusing the writing for the reader.

1. Tips for Better Writing

2. #1 Tip
• Practice, practice,
practice
• Practice makes perfect
• Perfect practice makes
perfect
• Be mindful and attentive
• Approach revisions with
constructive criticsm and
honesty: is it interesting?

4. Weird Al
• Word Crimes
• Bad Grammar and Writing
Style
• http://www.youtube.com
/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc
• NPR Segment
http://www.npr.org/2014/0
7/12/329873481/weird-al-
yankovic-on-parody-in-the-
age-of-youtube

5. The Original Mad Man
Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to
write well. Here are 10 hints:
1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it
three times.
2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.
3. Use short words, short sentences and short
paragraphs.
4. Never use jargon words like 'reconceptualize,'
'demassification,' 'attitudinally,' 'judgmentally.' They
are hallmarks of pretense.
5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.
6. Check your quotations.
7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it.
Read it aloud the next morning—and then edit it.
8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve
it.
9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure
it is crystal-clear what you want the recipient to do.
10. If you want ACTION, don't write. Go and tell the guy
what you want."

6. CIA
• Keep the language crisp and pungent;
prefer the forthright to the pompous
and ornate.
• Do not stray from the subject; omit
the extraneous, no matter how
brilliant it may seem or even be.
• Favor the active voice and shun
streams of polysyllables and
prepositional phrases.
• Keep sentences and paragraphs
short, and vary the structure of both.
• Be frugal in the use of adjectives and
adverbs; let nouns and verbs show
their own power.

7. CIA
• affect, effect: Affect as a
verb means to influence, to
produce an effect upon.
(The blow on the head
affected John’s
vision.) Effect, as a verb,
means to bring about. (The
assailant effected a change
in John’s vision by striking
him on the head.) Effect, as
a noun, means result. (The
effect of the blow on John’s
head was blurred vision.)

8. Revise
• Write a draft and let it
rest.
– Stephen King

9. Neal Gaiman
• You have to finish things —
that’s what you learn from,
you learn by finishing things.
• The process of writing can be
magical — there times when
you step out of an upper-floor
window and you just walk
across thin air, and it’s
absolute and utter happiness.
Mostly, it’s a process of
putting one word after
another.
• http://www.brainpickings.org/
index.php/2013/09/11/neil-
gaiman-advice-to-writers/

10. Margaret Atwood

11. Read
• Read a lot.
– Stephen King
• Respond in kind
• If it sounds like writing,
rewrite it.
• Andy Maslin
• Seth Godin

12. Simple and Direct
• Never use a long word
when a short one will
do.
– George Orwell
• Utilize use
• Receive get
• Eschew Clutter

13. Active Voice
• Never use the passive
voice when you can use
the active voice
– George Orwell

14. Know Your Audience
• Understand and know
your audience.
– Pierre Berton
• The Joy of Writing
• The two Ps
• What is your audience:
– Passionate about
– Pissed off about

15. Read yourself
• Recycle and read and
re-read the good stuff
you write
– Pierre Berton

16. Miraculousness
• Honor the
miraculousness in the
ordinary.
• Examples
• Poems by Sherman
Alexie
• Prodigal Summer
– Barbara Kingsolver

17. Creativity is Subtraction
• Good Copy = draft –
10%
– Stephen King

18. Edit
• Look at every word inn
a sentence and decide if
they are really needed.
If not, kill them. Be
ruthless
• Don’t be afraid to kill
you babies.
– Bob Cooper

19. Encourage Others
• Remember: Writing
doesn’t love you.
Nevertheless, it can
behave with remarkable
generosity. Speak well
of it, encourage others,
pass it on.
– Al Kennedy

20. Elmore Leonard
• Never open a book with weather.
• Avoid prologues.
• Never use a verb other than "said" to carry
dialogue.
• Never use an adverb to modify the verb
"said”…he admonished gravely.
• Keep your exclamation points under control.
You are allowed no more than two or three
per 100,000 words of prose.
• Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell
broke loose."
• Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
• Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
• Don't go into great detail describing places
and things.
• Try to leave out the part that readers tend to
skip.