Is your article ready?

You’ve chosen a topic, narrowed the focus, perhaps drafted an outline to keep your writing organized, and now you’re ready to write. How well the finished piece “turns out,” whether it be an article, essay, article, editorial, composition, report, letter, advertisement, blog post, or other copy in English, will depend on a few additional key aspects. If you don’t want publishers to get upset, or your reader to go to the hills, you should consider these five areas of improvement to fine-tune the “details” of your writing.

How to drastically improve

You can dramatically improve your article and other writing almost immediately in these five easy ways.

1. Use spell check

Sometimes, even most of the time, it’s not your fault. Keys get stuck on the keyboard, you miss a keystroke, stumble over a frequently misspelled word, or just make a mistake. we all do. It’s not a big deal, but it annoys editors and readers alike when a series of misspellings mar our writing. Sometimes my computer software changes a word I’ve typed to be the wrong one. Has that ever happened to you?

How to avoid misspelling

However, misspelling, whether due to error or uncertainty, is preventable. I eat? By using the spell check feature in MS Word or other word processing software. Any time you see those little wavy red lines under a word, check the spelling option on your computer. Don’t forget that as a writer you should also have a good dictionary or two handy. Sometimes the computer won’t “know” a perfectly valid word like “blog”.

2. Use the grammar check

Alright, I’m a college level English teacher and grammarian, but you don’t have to be. If you have gaps in your English grammar skills or knowledge (not all of us do), then don’t worry. There is an easy cure. Use MS Word’s spell check feature to keep track of things for you. Whenever those little wavy green lines appear under a sentence or sentence, it’s time to look at the suggested correction or pull out your English grammar text reference. If you don’t have a good one, then it’s time to head to your local bookstore. Hood?

In the second part of this two-part article, we’ll look at using relevant facts and citations, statistics, and references to increase the authority of your writing and provide an additional measure of improvement to your articles.