Writing isn’t like riding a bike, so every student needs a constant practice to nail it, but there are many ways that a student can improve their writing. Even though writing styles differ from articles to fictional stories, similar methods are used to tackle “writing” in general. Strategic approaches like outlining, proofreading, and being concise are excellent ways that students can improve their writings.    

Once a student picks up a pen and a paper or their computer’s keyboard to write, tons of ideas come rushing through their mind, and organizing these ideas into coherent writing can be challenging. Outlining is the best technique of aligning all these ideas into an organized, strong, and meaningful piece of writing. Muna, a student in high school, doesn’t write outlines most of the time, so she struggles with making connections between her claims and examples. For example in her winter journal, Muna writes, “Armand and Desiree were in love, but as Armand came to notice the baby’s skin, his love for Desiree seems to disappear. ” This is the first sentence of a paragraph; however, it doesn’t give a claim or introduce the main idea of the paragraph. The sentence is simply a short summary of the story. Through outlining, Muna could have noticed that “topic sentences” should introduce the paragraph’s main idea, and could have constructed a better sentence. Outlining would help students see the bigger picture of their writing and compose a much stronger topic sentences and logical claims.

Proofreading is most effective technique of improving a student’s writing because a student can easily find their mistakes by just rereading their writing. Through proofreading, students are able to locate and fix grammatical errors such as verb tenses, punctuations, articles, and etc. Reading out loud is most significant approach of finding these grammatical errors. Referring back to Muna’s style of writing, punctuations and verb tenses seem to be her biggest struggles. With punctuations, knowing the rules helps significantly. On her blog Muna writes, “In my opinion, travelling is: the butterfly excitement…” the colon is misused in this sentence, and Muna could have figured out that colons don’t come after a verb from her previous knowledge about punctuations by doing a deeper proofreading. Some grammatical mistakes are sometimes accidental, and fixing these mistakes are much easier to do. When students are writing, they tend interchange verb tenses throughout their writing, but it's very simple to notice these mistakes if the students read their writing out loud. Proofreading is never a lost cost, and it should definitely be in your checklist if you want your writing to improve.

Writing isn’t about quantity but rather about quality. The quality of the writing is lost when the quantity of it is large. For this reason, most people tend to require “word count”. The main purpose behind “word count” is learning the ability of being concise. Most of writing assignments such as articles, and science labs require concision; however, most students think that concision is an implication of writing short sentences. This interpretation is stigmatized because concision is all about getting your point across in the most efficient way. Being concise makes the writing more interesting and easily understood. Using run-on sentences and to many complex sentences makes any writing more complicated and act as slippery slope for making grammatical mistakes. Alternatively, being concise drags your reader’s attention and doesn’t waste a lot time from the reader. More importantly, concision is a great tool for any student who wants to become a scientist or a media writer.

Writing is a type of communication, and knowing how to communicate is essential to life. Students, who want to improve their writing, should outline, proofread, and be as concise as possible. All of these techniques contribute to the message, format, and the performance of the student’s writing. Applying all of these techniques would improve the student’s writing significantly.