Whether you’re a student or a working professional, learning how to write articles is an essential skill for a career in writing. From websites to magazines and newspapers, every industry needs writers to produce quality content that attracts and engages readers. If you’re keen to learn how to become a better writer, here are some helpful tips to get you started:
Choose a Topic and Research It
You want to be confident that you can cover your subject completely in a short space of time. For this reason, I recommend you choose a niche that interests you and devote a week or two to researching and writing about it.
This will give you a strong understanding of your subject matter and a solid base to build on as you go along. You’ll also develop a deeper knowledge of your audience and how to speak directly to them.
Revise Your Drafts
You can make a big difference to your articles by spending time revising them. Before you submit them, it’s worth taking them apart and rereading them three times. This will help you spot any issues that need to be addressed.
Read Other People’s Work
You should always read a variety of different types of writing to improve your own skills. Reading classic novels, short stories and blog posts will give you an idea of the different ways in which English is written.
Then, you can take what you’ve learned from reading other people’s work and apply it to your own writing. For example, if you’re a writer who specializes in technical writing, reading articles from the science and technology sections of your newspaper can teach you how to structure and format your own work correctly.
Paragraphing is an important part of writing that students need to understand well. They should know where to break up information in a piece of text and how much space to leave between each paragraph.
It’s also important to remember that the length of your paragraphs will depend on the type of article you are writing and the level of language you need to use. In the case of a technical article, for instance, longer paragraphs may be required to convey the complexity of your subject matter.
To practice paragraphing, you can give students a copy of an article with the paragraph breaks removed and ask them to work together in groups to decide where to put each new break. This will encourage them to think about the article’s purpose, the type of publication they’re writing for and the nature of the information they need to communicate.
