“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” I look to this quote by Thomas Edison for inspiration when trying to strengthen my skills as a writer.

There are multiple venues to build your writing skills and enrich you knowledge. Areas to keep in mind include citation/documentation, imagery, literary tools, organization, paragraph structure, poetry, prose, quotations, sentence fragments, thesis statements, etc. Study of each of these ideas and memorization of their meanings and rules provides for better skill development.

Another tip to apply to your expertise development is to avoid weak and overused aspects of writing. When ignored, this causes the power and effectiveness of your writing to diminish. Try to stay away from “to be” verbs and use active verbs in place of them. As a writer, you will want your verbs ‘to do something’ rather then ‘exist’.

Also, remember to employ a wide variety of vocabulary. Choose nouns, adverbs, and adjectives that are strong and imply believability, while staying away from those that are weak and could compromise your reliability. Exert diction with your word choice in order to help strengthen your argument, which will in turn build your integrity.

Finally, try to avoid bland terms. Using such terms might cause your audience to become bored easily, or weaken your credibility as a writer. Some terms to divert from include a lot, bad, good, great, kids, thing, really, very and so on. Also steer clear of slang, jargon, clichés and other forms of language that are informal and might suggest your writing style is lacking in knowledge and juvenile.

When keeping all these ideas in mind, you will strengthen the trust your audience has for you, as well as continue your personal growth as a writer.