Basic principles for exceptional writing

There are four crucial ingredients for exceptional writing: simplicity, clarity, elegance, and evocativeness. Simplicity makes your writing straight to the point, clarity makes it easy to understand, elegance makes it flow well, and evocativeness makes it stimulating.

In this article, you will learn how to use these four principles to improve your writing and create better content that converts.

Using excessively formal and fancy words will only make you seem pretentious. 

Simplicity helps to remove unnecessary fluff from your writing. It makes your writing more effective by expressing even complex thoughts in the simplest possible way while not drowning down your idea. Apply simplicity to your writing and it will stand out. 

Here are a few ways you can make your writing simple and easy to understand:

1. Strip out fancy language from your writing and cut the excess fat to make it sound more punchy.
2. Deal with redundant words, filler words, and implied words, and steer clear of repetition and rambling.
3. Make your ideas easy to understand and remove obstacles that make your writing more complex than it should be.
4. Remove unnecessary distractions from your writing, like pointlessly capitalized words or quotation marks around words for which there is no compelling reason.

Have you ever read something that leaves you confused? Many times, it is due to the writer's inability to express thoughts clearly. 

Here are a few ways you can make your writing clear:

1. Avoid curly sentences

Be committed to making your writing more accessible to as many likely readers as possible.

2. Shun jargon

Jargon words like value-added solutions, stakeholders, and medium-term outlook are vague. They don’t carry your meaning across very well, so they are another obstacle to clarity.

3. Avoid ambiguity

One of the biggest things that stand in the way of clarity is ambiguity in writing. Avoid words that confuse the reader and make them wonder what exactly you're referring to.

4. Use punctuation carefully

 Misplaced punctuation often hurts clarity.

Evocativeness makes writing stimulating. When combined with simplicity and clarity, it can take your writing to another level. To boost the evocativeness of your writing;

Use stimulating words - 

Try not to overdo this. Using stimulating words is not always appropriate for business writing. However, it is necessary to know that you have the power to make your content more colorful with stimulating words.

Use active sentences - 

A passive sentence is one whose subject is projected as the thing acted upon rather than the actor in the sentence. Learn to know when you are using passive sentences.

An overlooked aspect of writing is elegance - the quality that makes writing flow well. Your ability to make writing flow well from beginning to end will keep your reader hooked to your content. 

A well-written article should flow like a musical lullaby. To do this effectively, you can either add rhythm to your sentences or add elegance to the structure of your writing. 

Here is how you can add elegance to your writing:

1. Create smooth transitions between sentences.
2. Order paragraphs in a more elegant way.
3. Make ideas more parallel within new sentences so that they don’t create any form of crankiness.
4. Make your writing sound more musical.