Think You’re A Good Writer? Might Want To Reconsider That
Writing is so simple anyone can do it. Seriously. They’ve been training you to write since you were in elementary school, after all, so it’s no surprise if you think you’re already pretty good at it.
A random sampling of blog posts, for instance, reveals multiple people stating in their blogs that they think they are “a pretty good writer.” Read through the articles on which they say that, however, and you’ll be amazed at the amount of bad writing actually present.
By bad writing, I’m not just talking about the lack of a strong voice or an unfortunate use of analogies in specific instances. Instead, I’m talking about really bad writing that will make even high school English teachers cringe — barely coherent sentences, strings of unrelated phrases and horrid grammar.
Want to know if you’re a really good writer? Try these things to get a less-biased assessment:
- Use a software to evaluate your writing. Try a grammar checker. Try a style checker. Try a plain English evaluation program. Try a readability software (MS Word has a couple of those built in). If a software thinks you’re decent, then you’ve probably got the basics right.
- Swap works with other writers online for evaluation. Find a writing forum where people help critique each others’ works and post yours. See what feedback you get. For the most part, it’s hard to trust the assessment of family and friends — they’ll find it hard to tell if your work is abhorrent.
- Attend a writing workshop and get feedback. If there’s a relatively affordable writing workshop in your area, then sign up for it. Bring printouts of your sample writing alone. Many writers attend these things just to get other people to see their work and acquire feedback. The same thing might benefit you.