6 Tips for Cleaning Up Your Writing! [Guest Post]

Most people struggle cleaning up their writing abilities and prowess. The following six quantitative tips will help improve your writing functionally for better performance, respect and recognition anywhere.

1. Use of serial comma

The policy of preceding every item in a list but the last one with a comma is common to every student and that should never be forgotten at one point. Adherence to serial-comma style eliminates the dilemma in the sentence therefore brings more clarity to the audience reading the sentences.

 

2. Check Your Work for Plagiarism

One of the worst things that could happen to you as a writer is failing to write unique and original work.  Duplicated content will not gain you recognition for your analogies and neither will it earn you more marks if you’re still studying. Even then, in a world where everything has been talked about, keeping you written work 100% unique is hard. However, with a strong plagiarism checker, you can be sure that your work will pass the general threshold for unique work.

3. Minimize Capitalization

Capitalization is the writing of a word with its first letter as an upper case and the remaining letters in lower case. Various words that are capitalized include job titles only before names, first word of a quoted sentence, proper nouns, title publications, titles of high-ranking government officials etc. Names that are not capitalized include those of academic majors, generic names of entities, names of seasons etc. Capitalization is a minefield; when in doubt, it’s advisable to look it up and search on the site for “capitalization” for many articles on the topic.

4. Repair Comma Splices

This is used where a sentence has two independent clauses. Therefore it helps to separate two independent clauses in a sentence and in that case a normal comma is not useful. Breaking the clauses into distinct sentences, or separating them with a semicolon or a dash — or a comma and a conjunction (and, or, and so on) is preferable.

5. Omission Of Extraneous Hyphens and Insertion of Necessary Ones

Compound nouns such as decision making, problem solving and similar compound nouns require no hyphen unless they precede a noun as a compound modifier for instance “decision-making procedure,” “problem-solving aptitude”). “Near collision” and other similar constructions don’t, either, with the same exception (“near-collision statistics”). Established compound modifiers usually don’t require a hyphen even before a noun (“high school student”). Hyphens have various uses and writers are advised to check up on the site to perfect their skills.

6. Limit Displays of Emphasis

As writers put much emphasis on something at times, they may make the whole article boring for readers. When adding emphasis, words can be italicized to indicate that they are being used to refer to themselves, not the things they stand for or to signal a foreign term (“Wunderbar” means “wonderful”), or to make sure the reader understands that something is really important. Words can be initial-capped to indicate irony or other humorous intent. Boldface is appropriate for introducing new vocabulary or otherwise calling attention to an unfamiliar term but is best limited to textbooks and guidebooks.

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About the author:

Sandra Miller is a freelance edtech writer from Brooklyn. She has PhD in English literature. You can reach her at Google+.