How to Amplify your Writing Career or 6 Bad Writing Habits to Drop Right Now

Please welcome guest blogger, Linda Craig. She is a blogger and freelance journalist so spends a lot of time at the keyboard, putting virtual pen to paper. Today, she’s going to share what she avoids in her professional writing. A few of these suggestions may surprise you:

As a creative writer, you really need to develop some good work habits in order to take your business to the next level. Amplifying your career means learning to become more productive, and skipping certain habits that only take up your precious time. By spending less time on unnecessary things, or by correcting certain bad habits, you will enjoy a much more fruitful career.

Advance in your profession as a creative writer by learning what are those bad writing habits you should put away right now:

1. Procrastination- your worst enemy

“I will write it tomorrow’. How many times does this sentence come into your mind? From ‘tomorrow’ it will become next week. This is how you postpone important work, and the result is that you will rush to write everything right before the deadline. The outcome? Poorly written content that does not reflect your actual good skills and creativity as a writer.

Learn to write your projects in time and don’t postpone them anymore. Just see how great you will feel when you finish a project before the deadline. Also see how happy your client will be, and he will thank you for that!

2. Proofreading- a waste of time

Indeed, performing your own proofreading is just a waste of time. During the time you spend on proofreading, you can basically start writing your next project, organize nicely your desk or have yourself a great coffee break. What you can do is outsource the proofing part of your project to experts, such as the ones at assignment writing service Assignmentmasters.

The highly skilled and professional editors and proofreaders will ensure to comb through your project and spot any little grammatical or stylistic mistake. They will perform proofreading at the highest standards of quality, and you can send your clients work that is 100% free from grammar mistakes, or stylistic issues. Save your time smartly and hire professional proofreaders for the task.

3. Working without a thesaurus

The English Thesaurus is basically the bible of any creative writer. Whether you like it or not, after some years of writing you develop a certain habit of using the same words and phrases all over. Now, start studying the thesaurus for great synonyms, antonyms and creative phrases. The Thesaurus will help you expand your linguistic horizons, and help you provide fresh, colorful, and genuine content for your client.

4. Plagiarizing

You need to avoid 100% plagiarism through your work. Even if you don’t want it, you can easily fall in the trap of plagiarism, and then clients will just keep rejecting you work. Therefore, use proper resources to learn to cite your sources accordingly. Even if you will put in your own words a great idea told by an important writer…that is still plagiarizing. That’s not your primary idea, so you should cite at the end of the paragraph the main source.

5. One day work. One day not.

Just as with any other profession, you need to be constant with your writing. Amplify your writing career and expand your knowledge base and experience by working every day. Even if you work from home, this does not mean you should have hectic schedule. You can stay much more organized and productive if you will have a well determined schedule. Work 4 hours, but work every single day… It’s better than working 10 hours a day and the next day not working at all. This habit will just turn upside down your entire life…

6) Writing without an outline

You can’t just sit down and write a very important article without having an outline. What are the main points that are going to be discussed? How many headings, sub-chapters you will have? Short paragraphs? Longer ones? How about the structure of the article?

Before writing, you should make an outline, or a rough draft of the article. Put down your most important thoughts, words and phrases that you want to use throughout the article. These will help you create much easier a perfectly structured article, post, story or eBook.

Just keep in mind these things next time you sit down writing. You cannot make all these changes in a day, but slowly these changes will become part of your daily work routine. Within a month or so, you wild definitely notice that your productivity increased greatly. This is the most important!

More on how to write:

It’s OK to Fail Over and Over and Try Again

The 10 Commandments of Fiction Writing

How to Write Like a Pulitzer Prize Winner

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Jacqui Murray is the author of the popular Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy. She is the author/editor of over a hundred books on integrating tech into education, adjunct professor of technology in education, webmaster for four blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer,  a columnist for TeachHUB, Editorial Review Board member for Journal for Computing Teachers, monthly contributor to Today’s Author and a freelance journalist on tech ed topics. You can find her book at her publisher’s website, Structured Learning.