How do I become a better writer?

I have a 3 star rating.

The 'ol adage of writers write is as simple as it gets. The more you write, the better you get, even if you are only writing for yourself in Word and nobody else will ever see it. You can scour the various writers forums on the net that do not pertain to IMing and certainly find advice there. Suggestions for exercises, etc. You can also find plenty of examples of folks posting their creative/fiction writing on these forums and try to see what they do.

To improve on the cheap, a trip to your local library will certainly yield books written by professionals handing out advice on how to make your writing more compelling. Depending upon where you live, most major library systems have their catalogues online, so you can search the library for what you are looking for from your home.

And definitely spend some hours perusing and posting to writing specific forums. Plenty of tips, tricks and helpful insights there. There are certainly some top notch writers here on this forum, but there is always the main subject of IMing going on here.

Compelling writing is an art, even if it is merely a 500 word article about how to change a light bulb. Read what others post at various writing forums and see if you can make distinctions, in your own mind, about who writes better than whom - and then try to figure out why that is.

Aside from the writing forums and a potential trip to the library, write some short story fiction. Just for yourself. Keep a thesaurus next to you (or an online one open in a tab) and try to write a 10 page short story. Focus on creativity. Read your work back to yourself, out loud in your mind, an then open that thesaurus and try replacing a word or two in a sentence here and there, and reread it in order to see if it sounds better or more completely defines your intentions.

It is a double edged sword on da net, but having a large vocabulary is incredibly important. You have to be careful with the three dollar words online, but the more options you have for saying something, the better chance you have to say it compellingly. Same thing goes for sentence structure and length. Practice writing ridiculously long sentences that are grammatically correct and still make sense.

For an example on that sorta stuff, turn to one of my favorite authors, Edgar Allan Poe. That dude still sends me scurrying to my dictionary on occasion. An incredible vocabulary and the ability to compose very complex sentences.

It is a craft. An art. Keep that in the forefront of your mind as you work to progress and improve your skills. And I ain't proofreading this post, so start there and see if I made any mistakes. :p

Best of luck. READ, WRITE, PRACTICE.

I am not sure if you'd want to use the textbroker requirements as the measure for your writing since it may depend on your client. If you ran your own warrior for hire ad you'd probably receive different types of emphasis. For instance, some people want a strong pre-sell. I hate getting back strong call to action articles from writers but prefer to get a lot of good research. If the grammar and punctuation isn't perfect, that is much faster for me to fix than insufficient research.

In terms of textbroker, perhaps you can write support and ask them to send a few samples of 4 star articles to you so you can analyze them.

Debbie

Agreed. I love to write because I'm such an avid reader. When I'm enjoying a great article, my subconscious is taking notes on the structure, word choice, imagery, etc. And those "subconscious notes" inform my writing.

I also read a lot of books on writing. I'm always in the middle of one writing book or another. And have been since I discovered writing books existed.

Reading things out loud can improve your writing. Find a good article, read it out loud, then try to write a summary (a paragraph or two) of the article that's in the same style.