Writing Like Shakespeare: How You Can Improve Your Writing Skills To Write Like A Pro

I’m a full-time content writer. I get paid to write PR material, blog posts, and website copy for companies and personal brands. By the strictest sense of the phrase, I could call myself a professional writer.

I may not be the best. I may not even be particularly good.

But I’m skilled enough for people to want to pay for my work.

And that must mean something.

Over the years, I’ve picked up a few tricks for improving my compétences en écriture. That’s “writing skills” in French.

Impressed? Don’t be.

I used Google Translate.

Anyway, I’ve used these tricks to develop my turn of phrase and hope that you could use them to improve your writing skills. (and maybe even get paid to write?)

Key Points To Improve Your Writing Skills

• Imitate your favorite authors.
• Learn to write with structure. Stream of consciousness isn’t always the best writing style.
• Get out on the field to create unique research and content.

But first, let me ask you…

What Are Writing Skills?

Regardless of the type of writing you do, there are five essential components of writing and subsequent skills that go along with them. They are as follows:

1. Prewriting: Prewriting is the process of gathering ideas and general information. The skills required for this process include:

• research,
• outlining, and
• article planning.

2. Writing: The writing part is when you sit down and, you know, do the writing. Ironically, in most cases, this takes up the least amount of time, and every writer has a unique routine for this part of the process. The skills required for this process include the capability to string together a couple of sentences in your natural language. Shouldn’t be that hard, eh?

3. Revising: Never publish your first draft. Go back and read it again. Make sure that you replace sections that aren’t as vivid or add in paragraphs to provide more detail to certain sections. The skills required for this section include:

• attention to detail,
• structure, and
• sentence construction

4. Editing: Editing is so important that I’ve reserved two steps on this list just for going back and revising your work. This editing step involves you going back and evaluating:

• grammar,
• Spelling,
• punctuation, and
• word choice.

This isn’t my exact writing process but if you’d like to learn more, then click here to learn more about my writing process (and how I use AI to finish work faster.)

Why Is Writing Important?

This process seems complicated. So you may be wondering: is writing worth this effort?

Well, writing is important for communication.

From a business perspective, strong writing defines a well-run business — because how could a corporation market to millions of people without good marketing and inter-team communication? What happens if their audience doesn’t understand what the product does? What happens if your team members don’t understand your business plan?

On a more personal level, you can clearly transcribe thoughts into more meaningful messages through writing. You could share ideas and build relationships through this process. In the digital age, where we could send and receive a message in seconds, the ability to concisely share exciting thoughts becomes extremely powerful.

How To Improve Your Writing Skills

So how do we effectively communicate through words? How can we create better content? Here are some tips for you to improve your writing skills:

Writing For Your Audience

A good writer is a story teller, no matter the format. When you’re writing, keep your audience in mind — but make sure that you have a very specific persona to write to.

Writing for an audience means that you know to whom you’re writing to. This impacts comprehension, sentence structure, and language use.

For example, if you’re writing about machine learning to your grandmother, you probably shouldn’t talk about neural networks without explaining what they mean first. If you were talking to esteemed academics, then go ahead.

To identify your audience, ask yourself the following questions:

• Who is my ideal reader?
• What are they interested in?
• How do I keep them interested?
• Why would they listen to me?
• How do they behave?
• How should I communicate to them?

Using The Right Phrases

In line with writing to your audience, make sure that you’re using the right phrases.

I recently came across “The Elements of Eloquence” by Mark Forsyth, and basically, Forsyth tells us that rhetoric and the art of writing well is a scientific process that could be broken down. He explains figures of rhetoric and uses examples from great writers to drive home his point. His examples include samples from all over the artistic world, including William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Katy Perry.

Here’s a link to the book. 🚀

In this book, he breaks down 39 different figures of speech and teaches us how to add them to your rhetorical bag of tricks.

Proofreading

To improve your writing, you need to go back and proofread your work.

ALWAYS doble-check your speling and grammer.

It’s as simple as that.

Research

Research always helps your content stand out. You’ll need to conduct surveys, ask questions, host interviews, or test your experiments yourself.

When conducting research, always make sure to have a plan of action in mind. Don’t collect data or ask questions without defining the hypothesis you’re trying to prove/disprove.

Unfortunately, I don’t have many other tips that’ll help speed up this process, In fact, you probably shouldn’t try to speed it up anyway. Take your time and conduct proper research through the methodology best suited for your study. These include:

• Interviews
• Focus groups
• Case studies
• Discourse analysis
• Quantitative Surveys
• Experimentation

What do you get out of it? Original, unique content that will be received well by your audience and the algorithms.

Google loves it, your audience will love it, and it’ll get you off of your computer.

Find out how Google ranks content for their Results Page.

Structuring

There’s a time and place for stream-of-consciousness writing. That won’t fly for most situations, especially if you’re writing for work or school.

So, how can you structure your stuff better?

There are two ways you could structure your piece:

• Chronological — chronological writing is when you order your writing based on the time at which you developed your thinking. Academic writing, for example, is chronological. You describe the background before discussing previous research. Then, you discuss your methods, conduct your experiment, and lay out your conclusions.
• Non-Chronological — Non-chronological writing is defined as when the reader needs the information. Business writing presents its abstract and conclusion upfront because that’s what everyone wants.

Being 1% Better Everyday

This is more of a mental framing structure than an actual actionable piece of advice.

When working on improving writing skills, I like to structure my curriculum in a way that allows me to focus on improving one aspect of my writing at a time.

There’s no point in attempting to write like Mark Forsyth, Malcolm Gladwell, or Seth Godin right from the get-go because you can never copy how they write without understanding why they write it that way.

I mentioned earlier that figures of rhetoric are like tricks in a bag; you can pull one out and use it to put a little extra flourish on your writing.

Trying different writing styles

I’m gonna be honest here. In most cases, AI writing is good enough for most marketing writing, especially if you’re writing just to rank on Google instead of actually connecting with the audience.

But I assume you don’t want your business or personal brand to sound like everyone else.

AI can only take you so far.

There will be cases where you should use different writing styles to convey ideas.

How do you come across different writing styles? By stealing from the greats.

“Good Artists Borrow; Great Artists Steal.”

– T.S. Elliot

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It’s a common quote by T.S. Elliot and I couldn’t agree any more. There’s no original idea under the sun; it’s all about refining what already exists, spinning concepts into new packages, and releasing them out into the world.

Have you ever noticed that Disney’s The Lion King closely resembles Hamlet?

Now, I’m not recommending outright plagiarism.

I’m talking about something more about studying and imitating how great authors assemble each sentence.

Here’s how to do that:

1. Take a stack of your target author’s work.
2. Read through a paragraph to understand its main point
3. Deconstruct and rewrite the passage in your own words
4. Compare your work to the original author.
5. Study the differences
6. Repeat

The practice is simple but long and arduous. The results, though, are striking.

This story was originally published on my blog: monasticspaces.com. Subscribe to my free weekly newsletter for more stories and insights on building a better life.