STUDY SKILLS
7 Tips
to Improve Your Writing Alumna and former mentor, Emilia Persson, gives us her top tips for improving your writing. Whether you’re applying to university, writing essays or writing cover letters for jobs, writing skills are essential at every stage of life.
Tip 1. Variety, not size.
tapping your feet, but since you can’t, let’s use some actual writing examples:
When it comes to sentences, longer is rarely intrinsically better. This is not to say that all sentences should read like a Dick and Jane book, but it’s easy to fall into the mindset that more complex sentences equal better writing. Untrue.
“I woke up. It was cold. The room was dark. I couldn’t find the phone. I had it last night. Now it was gone.”
A technique that some may find helpful is to treat your writing like a piece of jazz music, with the length and the makeup of the sentences standing in for the musical rhythms. Jazz music is not like a waltz, for instance, in which the rhythm remains everpredictable at BUM bum bum, BUM bum bum, BUM bum bum, ad infinitum. (My apologies to waltz fans everywhere.) Good writing should be much more like a jazz piece: BUM! Ba-da-da-dee-da-da-dum-diddy-diddydiddy-diddy-dum! Bob-bop doo wah diddy. Bum! Bum! Diddy-diddy bop!
If you could hear that in my head, you’d be 16 \
immersed
“When I woke up that morning, the room temperature caused my breath to hang in the air like tiny storm clouds, and in the darkness I was unable to find the phone which I had placed upon the bedside table just the night before when I returned home from the club at 2am.” “I woke with a start. The room was too cold, and my breath formed tiny clouds in the air. They reminded me of storm clouds. Why? I instinctively reached for the phone, but it was gone from the bedside table. Where was it? I searched my memory of the night before when I returned home from the club where I met Rebecca and her fiance. It was 2am by the phone’s glowing screen when I placed it in its accustomed spot. I must have passed out.”
Which phrase would you rather read? I vote for the third. immerse education alumni magazine
