January 19, 2018

Ace your article writing skills with these easy tips

writing - a person sitting and viewing the scenery by the lake

Articles are a great way to share a thought, story or a piece of information. But, as a writer, it’s sometimes difficult to craft a compelling piece that leaves a lasting impression in the minds of your readers. While there’s no shortcut to improving your writing skills, keeping a few things in mind can help you write well-structured and engaging articles.

 

First things first

Before you start writing your article, be clear about the topic and what you are aiming to convey through your writing skills. This will prevent you from drifting and diverging from your topic once you begin to pen down your thoughts.

 

Use your research skills before writing

Reading more will help you write better. Take time to perform comprehensive research on your topic and explore all its aspects. You will gain enough knowledge to get started and also get a clear idea of how to write the article.

 

Draft it out

Instead of beginning directly with the article, build a skeleton of your content. Compile all the information in this draft and read it multiple times. If you think it is comprehensive, interesting and does justice to your title, you are good to continue with the writing. Otherwise, revise it until you are satisfied with the draft.

 

Who are you talking to?

It’s essential for your writing skills that you understand your target audience. A conversation with a teenager from a tier 1 city of India will be very different to that with an SME owner from tier 2 city, and so should be the content of your article.

 

Think of the tonality

Always pre-decide the tonality of your article. Do you want your article to be warm, friendly and conversational or would you rather have a formal conversation with your audience? Do you want your content to sound enthusiastic or just matter-of-fact? Decide, keep the tonality in mind and ensure that it is consistent while writing the body of the article.

 

Well begun is half done!

An introduction gives direction to your article. Begin by describing what your article is about, and what your readers should expect from it. Make it welcoming and impactful, convince the user that your article will be worth his/her time.

 

Give it time

Keep aside a minimum of half an hour and a maximum of 2 days to edit your article to maintain perspective. #engageunfoolishly Click To Tweet

Every time you look at your piece, you gain a fresh perspective and therefore, have better points to include in it. Also, make sure that every draft of your article is 10-15% shorter than the previous one. This is because you will notice redundancies in your content that need to be done away with.

 

Are you forgetting images?

According to Jeff Bullas, articles with images get 94% more views than articles without images. You read it right, that’s 94%! If that’s the magic visuals can add to your articles, you definitely shouldn’t think twice before complementing your text with beautiful pictures, graphs and charts.

 

Don’t forget to conclude

While conclusions are going out of style, they still are one of the most important ways to sum up your content and package it in a few words. Think of how you want your reader to feel and what you want him to remember while parting from your page.

 

Finally,

Always run your article through plagiarism and grammar checkers available online. This will help ensure that quality is maintained in your content.

Click here to read more about the essential quality checks for your content.

 

You are now ready to write interesting, informative and engaging articles! Don’t forget to keep practicing; it’s the only way to master any skill.

 

Want to know more about the power of content? Click here to read what the experts have to say in Scatter’s e-book edition of the Content Marketing Power Talk.