7 Signs of Excellent Writing

When you’re not sure if your writing is up to par, check out these signs of excellent writing. They can give you a pretty good idea.

Informative title

A good title identifies the major theme of your writing. It tells the reader the topic of the writing immediately with no guesses required.

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If you’re the type who leaves the title for later, you can pick a title from your writing. Brainstorm the title from the attention-grabbing phrases that accurately depicts the whole writing.

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Think about your target audience too. An article written for an academic community should use formal language. There’s no room for funny stuff there.

Clear point from the get go

Normally, you would want to write an intro of some sort. That’s alright as long as you keep it short. The intro is just that – an introduction to give a little background to your work.

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As an example, let’s say you’re writing about how to write figs from seeds. In the intro, you tell the readers how many steps and how long it would take. After that, you go straight with the first step to the last.

Focus on one topic

An article about how to grow figs from seeds should cover that topic only. Write your opinions on which fig variety is the most prolific, cold hardy, delicious, and so on in different article(s).

Short sentences and paragraphs

Long sentences are hard to understand. Cut any sentence longer than 20 words into two parts.

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Also avoid walls of text at all cost. It’s hard to read on a computer monitor and almost unbearable on a phone screen.

Simple words throughout

Let’s use the example of planting figs from seeds again, shall we?

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Viable fig seeds come from figs pollinated with persistent or non-persistent caprifigs. However, only those pollinated by persistent caprifigs will produce edible figs.

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Now, if you’re a newbie in the world of figs, that short paragraph may not so easy to follow. What’s a caprifig? What’s the difference between persistent and non-persistent caprifigs? Is there a way to tell them apart?

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To make it easy for your audience, link any phrases, acronyms, and abbreviations to pages that describe them.

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Linking out is a quick fix for online articles. But what should you do when you’re writing for a printed media? That’s easy. Just provide a short description whenever you mention a term or phrase that your audience may not so familiar with.

Clear call-to-action

When you’re writing something that requires an action from the reader, write it as clearly as possible. State what the readers must do, where they should go, and when they should do it.

Free from misspellings

Run your writing through the online spelling and grammar checker. Even after you’ve proofread it, your writing may still have some misspellings that just slips stealthily.

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OK, that’s all for our short list of 7 signs of excellent writing. Be sure to run your work through this list to make sure that it is indeed as excellent as you think it is.