This is a list of the best writing tips on the internet. It’s a mix of common advice and personal insights from famous and not-so-famous authors.
- Write like you talk.
- If it sounds like writing, rewrite it. — Elmore Leonard
- Write like you’re talking to a friend in a bar.
- Don’t write words you don’t speak.
- Write what you like to read.
- “If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. — Ray Bradbury
- Read all your copy out loud.
- Anything that can be said can be said clearly. — Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Use the words your audience uses.
- Use short paragraphs.
- Write shorter sentences.
- Replace half your commas with periods. — David Perell
- The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. — William Zissner
- Vary sentence length.
- Increase whitespace.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do. — George Orwell
- Do not use similes, metaphors or other figures of speech that you often read online.
- Do not use foreign phrases, scientific words or jargon if there is an everyday equivalent. — George Orwell
- Go easy on the thesaurus.
- To impress people with your writing, stop trying to impress people with your writing. — Josh Spector
- Write to one person.
- Address the reader.
- Write actively.
- Write for skimmers.
- Write with passion.
- Write from a place of abundance.
- Use affirmative language.
- Keep it short.
- A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences. — Scott Adams
- Keep it simple.
- Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication — Leonardo Da Vinci
- Remember that many readers are not native speakers.
- Every word is a choice and every choice has a consequence. — Josh Spector
- Imagine you’re getting paid for every word you cut.
- Make your point and get out of the way. — Morgan Housel
- Choose words the average writer doesn’t use but understands.
- Remove “that” from your writing.
- Avoid adverbs.
- Ban stopwords.
- Be specific.
- Use visual language.
- Don’t tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on the broken glass. — Anton Checkhov
- If something bores you, it probably bores your readers too.
- Be fascinated in order to be fascinating.
- Don’t fall in love with your own words.
- Books are not there to show how intelligent you are. Books are there to show your soul. — Paulo Coelho
- Imagine you’re writing for a fifth-grader.
- Summarise the key points.
- Spread the insights evenly.
- Novelty is what keeps readers reading. — Julian Shapiro
- If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. — Stephen King
- Every topic is bigger than it seems at first.
- Create content that creates conversation.
- Follow the rule of one.
- If you try to make more than one point, you’ll make no points. — Benjamin Putano
Receive weekly writing advice and productivity tips
- Build your narrative around one key question.
- Figure out what you want to say by deleting what you don’t. — Josh Spector
- Scratch your own itch.
- Write about things people see but don’t notice.
- When you’re sharing what’s important to you, when you’re sharing the truth that you feel people need to say, you will find that the difficult parts of writing fall away. — Ryan Holiday
- Scrutinise every word for bias.
- Be aware of the curse of knowledge.
- Assume you’ll be misunderstood.
- Readers aren’t as smart as you’d think. — Scott Adams
- Make your opening sentence intriguing.
- Start with a personal story.
- End with a question or CTA.
- Hide intent in plain sight.
- Add value.
- Write your first draft with gusto, then edit ruthlessly.
- Your first draft is for generating and connecting ideas. — Julian Shapiro
- When you write the first draft, you write it for yourself. When you rewrite it, you write it for everyone else. — Stephen King
- Once you’ve jumped into the writing process, don’t stop to do more research.
- Don’t judge. Let it flow. Edit later. — Prabhsimrat Gill
- The best editor for your writing is you in one month. Let enough time pass that you forget what you wrote. — Julian Shapiro
- The process of writing your second draft is the process of making it look like you knew what you were doing all along. — Neil Gaiman
- When you think you’re finished, retype it. — Nicholas Baker
- People think you need to be inspired to write. No, you write in order to get inspired. — Paul Jarvis
- Great ideas emerge while writing — not before. — Julian Shapiro
- Don’t feel like you need to know exactly what your story is about at the beginning; let the story emerge. — Jamie Russo
- The best way to address writer’s block is to start writing.
- Show up, show up, show up and after a while, the muse shows up too. — Isabel Allende
- Everything you write can be improved, what’s not written can’t be improved.
- This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard. — Neil Gaiman
- Stop when you’ve got something left to say. — Ernest Hemingway
- Always carry a notebook and a pen.
- Writers are the best observers.
- Don’t be afraid.
- Learn from others but don’t compare yourself to others.
- Ignore the haters.
- Don’t worry about being original; nothing is original.
- Amateurs think about entertaining an audience. Professionals think about moving an audience from one point of view to another. — Justin Mikolay
- Showing beats telling.
- Make your reader feel smart.
- Address the pains of your reader.
- Write as if someone has their thumb on the end call button.
- You should care to share your soul and not to please other writers who will write a review that nobody is going to read. — Paulo Coelho
- You can’t be a good writer without being a devoted reader. — J.K. Rowling
- If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time — or the tools — to write. Simple as that. — Stephen King
- Books are a mix of your and your friends’ experiences. — Chuck palahniuk
- To write is to think using your mind’s full capacity.
- The difference between good writers and bad writers is good writers know when their writing is bad. — Dan Brown
- Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you’re doomed. — Ray Bradbury
- Ignore all the proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say. — Michael Moorcock
- Start writing as soon as you wake up. — Benjamin Putano
- All those I think who have lived as literary men will agree with me that three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write. — Anthony Trollope
I hope you don’t mind if I make a suggestion: I suggest to make the list shorter. This list has some great advice, but it needs some curating.
Items 1, 3 and 4 are basically saying the same thing. Remove the redundancies and you provide more value to the reader.
Thanks for sharing and all the best.
Hi Dave!
I don’t mind. I understand your point of view and I’ve considered it. Yet I found them to be slightly different enough to include all.