Writing Tips For Beginners
3 Ways to Improve Your Writing off the bat
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“I don’t write well. I want to learn how to write. But I don’t know where to start.”
If this is your first thought, then you are already on the right track. Writing is a skill that takes time to develop and improve. Luckily, there are plenty of ways.
Here are three of the first steps you can take.
1. Read more, write more
Let me give you a weird example of how and why this works.
My 13-year-old son is a gamer. I’m not. When I sit with him, trying to spend some father-son quality time on his territory, and play some Call of Duty with him — I probably suck more at first-person shooter games than anything in the world — one thing amazes me the most: his speed of perception.
I could never dream of moving as fast and as agile as he can make his little avatar jump, run, crouch and just obliterate the opposing team in the world’s most popular shooting game. Let alone shoot and kill as many enemies as he can. Not even by a long shot. Pun intended.
Why? It takes me just so much time and energy to simply perceive in the game. What all is going on; where am I, what are my bearings? Who is a teammate, who is an enemy? What is that extra information displayed in the screen; the text in the middle and on the bottom, a map on top?
You want to know how that difference in in-game perceptual speed between me and my son came to be?
By him watching a lot — and I mean a lot — of gameplay by Youtube gamers online when he was younger. I never understood why he’d want to spend so much time watching other people play, as many kids from his generation had a tendency to do.
Now I get it. His watching other, (more advanced) gamers play videogames, is the same as you and me watching other writers write. In other words: it’s the same as us reading.
Because he wanted to become a better gamer, he automatically trained his brain to perceive at lightning speed and to almost fully subconsciously know what to do and how to react in certain situations in that environment.
