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So recently, I have become a freshman at high school. My writing is not necessarily the best, and I’m joining the speech time. I enjoy writing in my spare time but I don’t think that my writing extremely good. Do you guys have any tips and tricks to getting better at this?

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  • Could you perhaps narrow this down for us? This is so broad that any answer would be a stab in the dark as to answering a plausible interpretation. Well, other than 'practice', but that is equally broad and really doesn't help much, I assume. Would you like to get better at writing short stories, serial fiction, novels, fan fiction, academic papers? What are we looking at here?
    – Fayth85
    Oct 8, 2019 at 2:36
  • It's also possible you're really asking about 'storytelling' as an art form, or about the various story structures. Or about writing different sub-genres of fantasy, or writing hard sci-fi. Maybe you're asking about character arcs, character development, or just creating characters? 'write better' could possibly incorporate all of these things, and dozens if not hundreds of other topics.
    – Fayth85
    Oct 8, 2019 at 2:39
  • Hi Lol_man000, welcome to writing.se! Please take the tour and visit the help center to learn about the site. As Fayth85 says, this question is currently impossibly broad to answer. What sort of advice as you looking for? Do you need technically help or resources for learning? Are you writing for a specific context or just wanting to improve in general? We can't answer for all situational without more information. Please edit your question to give more details so that we can help. Good luck and happy writing!
    – linksassin
    Oct 8, 2019 at 2:44
  • Sorry for the delay, I’m actually looking for help in two sub genres. Academic papers, and secondly novel writing.
    – WwW
    Oct 8, 2019 at 3:46
  • For novel writing I recommend this related question. For papers check out our academic-writing questions. If you find something you want to know but isn't covered by those questions you can edit this one or ask a new one. Try to keep each questions focused and clear.
    – linksassin
    Oct 8, 2019 at 4:34

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As Margaret Atwood said: You become a writer by writing. There is no other way.

I understand how annoying this sounds, because it seems so obvious. But it is so easy to forget. Before I give my personal tips on how to improve, I want to let you know that the most important thing is to put what you learn into practice.

Learn grammar and formatting

I wish someone had knocked on my door back when I was eleven years old and told me, “Grace, you need to start a new paragraph every once in a while.” Looking back on my old work, the one thing that never fails to make me cringe is the paragraph breaks. Or, shall I say, lack thereof. Putting in the time to understand things like semicolons, quotation marks and what the difference is between “who” and “whom” can really pay off. Looking up some of these things on google should get you by.

Study character and storytelling

Assuming that you mean you want to write fiction, I would instantly tell you that character is one of the most important things you can learn, and storytelling is an important skill even for everyday life. Again, there are many different ways to learn about this, my favorite being watching YouTube videos. Watch people analyze Marvel movies or TV shows. Some good channels I can recommend are The Closer Look and Mark Crilley’s series on creating stories and comics.

Have confidence

Write as if you are brilliant, because if you keep writing, you will be.

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  • Yes, write more to improve. I would also add that you want to get some feedback/critique of your work to learn what your good at and what you need to improve on. There are some online resources like The Write Practice blog that discuss different writing topics and encourage submitting a piece for others to review.
    – sambler
    Oct 8, 2019 at 4:17

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