Strategies to Meet Your Writing Goals in 2024

We are just a few months into 2024, and most of us have already started working out how to achieve our goals. For students, scholars, and professional authors, one of the goals that often make it to the list is to be a better writer. Of course, this is easier said than done. However, there are some strategies that you can use to meet your writing goals.

Be Human
2024 is a year filled with wide access to artificial intelligence and tools that can make writing sound like a robot. It doesn’t help matters that most academic tasks require the students to be authoritative and formal. This can make your writing to be full of jargon and complex. However, even academic writing can have a human touch. To do that, incorporate stories.
Anecdotes are short stories that make a student’s essay or writing task come to life by illustrating the main point in a fun way yet ensuring that your work aligns with the academic standards. So, even with a limited word count, use anecdotes to develop your writing skills and find unique ways of injecting humor into all content.
If you’re having trouble writing anecdotes, click on https://essayusa.com/ to find an expert who can help, or ask your teacher for some examples. You can also read books to learn how to craft anecdotes in different settings. Just ensure you create your own short story in a way that adds depth to your writing.

Be Specific

Regardless of the academic level, it’s easy for a student to see writing as not more than content that will get you a good grade. That means once a teacher has graded the paper, the student forgets about it and focuses on the next writing task. As a result, it’s difficult to see the impact of the academic paper or writing project beyond its completion. However, just like any other goal, writing something worthy of being published or remembered needs to be SMART.
Do you need to write more than 10,000 words this year? Or maybe you want all your writing tasks to translate to an excellent grade. Yes, we all have different reasons for writing, but at the end of it all, we want something we can be proud of.
To do that, ensure your writing goals fit within the SMART framework. A good example is to make it a daily habit to write a page or 250 words. This is specific, time-bound, measurable, relevant, and achievable. What’s even great is that your writing skills will be on another level by the end of the year.

Treat Writing Like a Job

A simple search online of a writer’s salary points to payment made per hour. What this means is that a writer is paid for the amount of time they put in to complete a task or project. With this concept in mind, even when progress is slow, you still have to put in the work.
But if you consider it a well-paying job, then truly time is money. So, look at your current writing approach or routine; does it need to get fine-tuned? If it does, look at several successful writers’ routines and see if they are similar to yours.
Remember, you can use another person’s routine as a source of inspiration, but don’t follow it to the latter because we all work differently, and one person’s way of approaching writing may not apply to you. Overall, if you look at writing as a job that you love, you won’t resent it.

Don’t Wait for Ideal Conditions

For most people, good writing has to be done in ideal conditions. For a student, this might be in a library or dorm room when it’s quiet. While this is great, it often puts the writer in a space where excellent writing is produced only when the conditions are right or ideal. But for your writing to evolve, you must push the boundaries and be willing to venture outside your comfort zone. A great way to do this is to try different writing styles or genres.

What this does is to sharpen your skills and unleash creativity. It also makes you see words in different contexts. For this to work, you must step out of your comfort zone but do it with an open mind.

Don’t Write People to Sleep

Most students have been taught that writing is wordy and strict in terms of adhering to academic conventions and citation styles. Adhering to this form of writing can easily put a reader to sleep. The trick to inject life into your writing while maintaining a professional tone is to make academic text interesting. One way to do this is to give quotes or statistics context and then analyze it. This ensures that it makes sense and fits perfectly into the rest of the paper. Another way is to avoid using a lot of technical jargon. Instead, communicate your main points without being overly complex.

Learn to Edit Without Emotions

You’ve finally finished your essay, novel, dissertation, or short story. You’ve checked it for grammar and spelling mistakes, and it looks perfect. But is it ready to be seen and judged by another person? If you’ve hesitated to answer this question or even said no, it’s best to give the writing a second look. Most students and scholars dread editing because it’s a way to critique work. It’s also a way of saying the finished text is not good enough, which can elicit emotions.
After all, a writer has put in their sweat, time, and hard work to create a masterpiece. Editing that is done without emotions is a necessary evil and a skill that needs to be mastered by those in the education and writing industry.
A great way to do this is to ask, “Will this text get me a good grade or cause my editor to tell me I have done a good job?” If the answer is no, then look at the piece and identify specific sections that need to be changed. Don’t hesitate to use several tools to polish your writing or ask a friend to be a second pair of eyes.

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