15 Tips to become a better writer overnight

over the past year I've tweeted hundreds of different writing tips but the 15 that I'm about to share with you have accumulated over a million views and thousands of likes and comments so here they are all in one place writing tip number one make the first and last sentences the most important sentences in the piece and make the last word in the sentence the most important word in the sentence so really small thing but you'll recognize it immediately so for example if I say you knew who the first president was the last word in that

sentence is was and that is not the most important word in that sentence so it doesn't end with emphasis you can fix this by just changing the order of the words and saying you knew the name of the first president president is the most important word in that sentence so when you make the last word of the sentence the most important word now it has emphasis and so this is true both on a sentence level but it's also true on a piece level so the very first sentence of your piece and the very last sentence

of your piece should be the two ideally the two strongest sentences in the piece because you want to open with something very declarative and you want to end with something very declarative that creates that bookend feeling for the reader writing tip number two you can increase reader engagement by increasing the rate of Revelation so if you've never heard this term before rate of Revelation is how quickly you introduce new information to the reader so low rate of Revelation for example would be one idea stretched across hundreds of pages a very high rate of Revelation would

be lots of ideas compressed into one page right so a video like this is a great example here 15 writing tips right I'm not spending 45 minutes talking about one writing tip that would be sort of a slow be a very slow rate of Revelation instead High rate of Revelation I go I'm going to take lots of writing tips and compress them into one video or one podcast right so a really great writing technique especially in the digital age is to always ask yourself how can I increase the rate of Revelation how can I reveal

new information as quickly as possible to the reader writing tip number three practice writing in different interfaces so both analog and digital so don't just write on your laptop you know write in a physical Journal write on napkins at a bar right on loose leaf paper you know write short form LinkedIn posts right long form medium articles every time you change the medium and I noticed there's something that happens whenever you you are writing within a different UI you know whenever you're in some sort of different user interface you think about language differently like one

of my favorite writing exercises I ever did in college was uh our teacher said write a story using your non-dominant hand and it was such a revealing exercise because I it made you realize that because you couldn't write with your non-dominant hand writing every single word was so painful it took so long that I found myself inherently picking different words and shortening the things that I was trying to say I was I wasn't being long-winded because it was so painful and annoying for me to write every single word so it changed the way that I

was writing and I've noticed this over the years too like when I write in a Google doc something it's like I view the words differently than if I write it in notion which which is different than when I write it in medium which is different than when I write it on my phone so you always want to be looking for and practicing in these different mediums or a really great editing technique is to take something that you've written in one domain and then read it uh on a different device or in a different domain so

something I do all the time is I'll write on my laptop but then when I'm rereading it later I'll send it to my phone and I'll read it on my phone because there's just something about reading it in a different UI that makes you notice things differently writing tip number four I call this the tequila test so if you ever want to ask yourself how to differentiate your content you do the tequila test and the way I like explaining this is if I were to ask you and say you know go write an article about

how to build or have an effective morning routine well a lot of the things that you've heard are probably going to spring to mind you're going to be like well to have an effective morning routine you should wake up early set an alarm you should stretch you should drink a gallon of water you should have some coffee you should you do do your morning mantras like all of the things that people talk about with morning routines okay so how do you differentiate your content well you take that list of all the things that you've heard

other people say and all the things that you could possibly say on this topic and now you can't say anything on that list so now what do you say and it's in that moment that you have the opportunity to say something different right so you have to first make a list of all the things that people normally say and then you can't say any of them now what and I call it the tequila test because for example if I wanted to go differentiate a morning routine article every reader is used to oh you got to

wake up early you got to set an alarm you got to have some coffee you got to stretch right they're used to reading all of those things but if I come along and I say hey effective morning routine step one soon as your alarm goes off roll over take a shot tequila well because they've never seen or heard that before the content is immediately different and so I like using that as an example to show how you become differentiated as a writer is you should constantly be asking yourself the question how can I say things

that haven't been said before and the only way that you can really do that is to first start with a list of all the things that most people currently say and now you can't say any of them writing tip number five open your essay articles with the 131 technique so if you're unfamiliar this is a huge topic I talk about in my book The Art and mes of online writing it's something we harp on in ship 30 for30 131 one is this writing Cadence where you open with one declarative sentence you go into three sentences

or a small paragraph of description of explanation and then you end with one declarative sentence and this 131 immediately injects Rhythm into your writing it's like you you have a very easy entry point into the idea then it sort of builds and you have some explanation and then it ends with this nice little checkpoint and you can repeat 131 all the way down the page and the reader is going to have no idea they're just going to sit there and go wow this writer writes so rhyth Al it's beautiful I love I'm just sliding down

the page right that's because rhythm is baked into the 131 sequence and there's all sorts of other sequences I talk about in my book for example you could do 12521 you could do 141 you could do 151 right there's all sorts of different things you can do but as a rule of thumb you always want to keep the bookends one in one and you want to expand the middle because that's what creates that Dynamic flow so if you want to have readers fall into your writing especially in the intro or you want to keep them

hooked all the way down the page you should always be asking yourself how could I use this 131 technique writing tip number six ignore word count as a metric so broadly speaking I think that word count is a horrible way of measuring value I I don't think that it's productive to sit there and go well my piece is only 800 words should it be longer because that's not really what matters the word count isn't what the reader cares about what the reader cares about is whether or not you successfully explained the thing that you set

out to explain or whether or not you answered the reader question and I lived this when I was building my ghost writing agency uh we were selling you know 800w is thought leadership articles and something that clients would ask us all the time is well what happens if we need to do some rewrites or what happens if a piece ends up being longer than 800 words do we have to charge extra and a huge part of our sales pitch is I would say to them and i' I'd go look if all the piece requires is

700 words that's what we're going to do but if the piece requires 1500 words that's what we're going to do we're going to do justice to the piece I don't care what the word count is I want to make sure that the reader is getting what they need out of the piece and every time I said that clients would it was like music to their ears because they were so used to every other like SEO agency being like well if it's over 750 words we're going to charge you extra right but who cares word count

is not the value the value is whether or not you successfully communicated to the reader so ignore word count you can start with it Broad like if you're picking a format you know you're like oh I want to write a book okay generally how long is a book 60,000 words all right I'm going to aim for something like that right or I want to write an article online what's the average article well it's probably within the ballpark of 700 to 1500 words so you can aim for that but the specific word count is not what

matters writing tip number seven reduce writer's block by prepping the page so if you've never heard this term before it's something I talk about a lot prepping the page is where you don't start writing by writing you start writing by shelling out the skeleton of the thing that you're going to write this is how I write everything doesn't matter if it's an email a Twitter thread a book chapter I start by prepping the page every single time and what this means is You Begin by first putting a working title and then chunking segmenting the Page

by sections and I tend to do this using headers so if I'm writing an article for example I'll put in a working title and then I'll go well what are the main points what are the things that I'm trying to say and I'll write those out as big headers and then underneath each header I might just to notes to myself I might do a bulleted list or I might just do a couple sentences of Pros or explanation and all I'm doing is I'm basically shelling out the thing that I'm about to write and I only

sit down to actually write I only start writing the pros once the skeleton is in place because then I'm I it doesn't feel like I'm staring at this blank page and I need need to go make magic happen all I have to do is just go Section by section and go well the main idea I'm trying to explain here is this I already know what the idea is now I just need to explain it so prepping the page is a really really helpful mechanism for reducing writer block and I think one of the biggest mistakes

writers make is they sit down to write and they open a fresh Word document and then they start with the first word and that's like showing up to a forest pitch black outside with a flashlight and you're like I'm going to find my way home right you you don't want to do that you want to light the whole Forest up first and the way that you do that is by segmenting the page into pieces writing tip number eight don't use semicolons this is a short and simple one most people have no clue what a semicolon

does most writers use them incorrectly and most readers have no clue what it means so just don't use semicolons because you're probably using it incorrectly and even if you do the reader is not going to know because most people didn't do very well in English class and most people don't even know what a semicolon does writing tip number nine cut all the tiny word chunks so after you've written a draft you want to go back and look for wherever you see in sentences a bunch of little words next to each other so this usually manifests

as something like and so as I was saying right or it uh it is so for example or if it is that or is it that like whenever you see lots of two or threel words back to back to back almost always there is a more economical way of of saying that and so when you're writing your first draft it's okay this is just you know most people write like they speak and so you have all these little words thrown in there but as you reread it back you want to train yourself to look for

these little word chunks and in most cases you can just remove all of them and and in other cases it's just a matter of compressing them into one word or rewording the sentence so that you don't need as many of them writing tip number 10 delete adverbs so this was one of Hemingway's favorite writing rules adverbs are usually unnecessary they're used for description but the reality is they they make your writing less declarative and something you know Hemingway was a great example of this great writing is declarative and so when you have words like excitedly

or delicately or finely or carefully or subtly right yes you're adding a little bit of description but in another sense you're reducing the declarative nature of that sentence and I find that most great writing uses very few adverbs so again in your first draft or when you're writing something the first time it's okay you're going to talk that way you're going to write that way but one of the things that I tend to edit for whenever I'm going back through something is I'm always looking for the adverbs and I always just ask most of the

time my first impulse is oh I need that adverb and then when I sit with it for 3 seconds I go oh I don't actually need that adverb writing tip number 11 use bulleted lists so whenever possible I'm always asking myself how can I break up Pros so especially if I have you know a long paragraph or multiple long paragraphs back to back I want to find other ways to make the writing more skimmable and then to sort of give the reader a break remember reading in the digital age is hard you know there's always

Tik Tok there's always Instagram there's always something easier that the reader could be doing so I always like to ask the question how can I make this easier and easier for the reader and one of the best ways that you can do that is to utilize bulleted lists because bulleted lists are very skimmable they they require very little cognitive load right and so whatever you're trying to say in a paragraph you want to ask yourself huh could this actually be a bulleted list instead of a paragraph and it's one of those things like you don't

want huge paragraphs back to back and you also don't want an entire piece of just bulleted lists so what I like to do is just a good rule of thumb is if I have a paragraph of Pros one or two pars later I want it to be a bulleted list and then once I have a bulleted list I want to go back to pros and then after some pros I want to go to a bulleted list if you've read I mean it's all over the art and business of online writing I use bulleted list all

all over the place in there but actually the art and business of ghost writing which I wrote after a lot of these Frameworks started to really crystallize for myself that book is a prime example of how to alternate between long paragraphs and bulleted lists that's how the entire book is written in structured and it's almost so much so that now when I read I look back and read it I'm like okay maybe I did it maybe it was Overkill maybe I didn't need to do it that much but I like to air on the side

of more bulleted list rather than less just because it makes it so skimmable for the reader it's such an effective technique which actually leads to writing tip number 12 I recommend starting most things that you're trying to write with a bulleted list lists are everywhere everything in life is a list and if you can't write the bulleted list version it's very hard to write the pros version and so whenever I'm sitting down to write one of the first things that I do is I just start with a bulleted list of well what what are all

the things I want to say about this topic right how would I outline a book well I wouldn't start outlining a book by writing Pros I would outline a book with a bulleted list of what are all the big topics I want to cover right which you can take that same technique and bring it all the way down to the Tweet level or the atomic essay level it's like I want to write a really short form post about you know three things you can do to get your first ghost writing client that's a list so

everything in life is a list and every time I explain this people think oh that's click baity stuff and that's that's really lowquality writing okay what do you think a pitz or prizewinning novel is like open up any page of any pitz or prize winning novel and it's just description after description after description what is that well if we were to really break it down that's just one giant list of things in a room right or things you notice about a person it's just they took the list and then they changed it to Pros right

so everything is a list and every creative writing exercise is a list so it's a great skill to build and I think it's much more helpful to begin with what's a list of all the things that I'm trying to say rather than starting the writing by actually writing writing tip number 13 delete opening eye phrases so things like I think I believe I've learned I conclude I had a teacher in college who pointed this out to me because I used it all throughout this essay and he circled every single one and he said you're the

author which means everything in this essay are the things that you think and you believe and you've concluded and you've learned so you don't need to tell me I know that these are all coming from you and as soon as he pointed that out I changed my writing forever so I'm hoping to point it out here for you as well you don't need all of these I think I believe I conclude phrases and a lot of times when you remove them the writing becomes more concise the writing becomes more declarative writing tip number 14 this

is a painful one and I am sure you're going to hear it and you're going to be like that makes sense and then you're not going to do it but I'm going to share it anyway which is instead of trying to tweak an existing draft of something so instead of doing the rewriting inside an existing Draft take the draft put it aside don't look at it and then rewrite that same thing without looking at the first version and the reason I love this this is this is how I did all of the rewrites of my

first book by the way Confessions of a Teenage gamer I rewrote that book so many times I mean front to back four times there are some chapters in there that I rewrote a 100 times and the way that I went about the rewriting process was I would take the thing I originally wrote I would read it and then I would put it aside and then I would rewrite it completely from scratch without looking at it again again and what I noticed and it's an it's an amazingly frustrating exercise because all of the details that are

really important are going to get repeated you're going to say them again but all of the details that are unimportant your brain is automatically going to filter out it's going to forget them and that is what makes the rewrite so powerful and what you'll notice you'll notice your brain just starts making new decisions or ignores old decisions just very intuitively and so I love just starting with a blank sheet of paper and seeing you know what does my unconscious prioritize and what ises my unconscious deprioritize and then I can always just hold the two drafts

up side by side and and go well I like these things from the first one and I like these things from the second one and then I can tweak from there but I find it's a much harder way of going about the rewriting process but I find that it leads to a higher quality end product and writing tip number 15 before you start doing some intentional writing I really encourage you to do some unintentional writing so something that I've done for the past 15 years is every single day before I sit down to write I

journal for 5 10 15 minutes and I do it for a couple reasons one I just want to get my fingers warm I just want to get my brain turned on I just want to get some of the gunk out you know whenever you sit down to write you're just usually you got a bunch of random things floating around your head I just want to get some of that stuff out second is I like to trick myself into feeling like I'm already in the writing flow so I don't start with something that I'm expecting to

be very good I start with something that's essentially just a coloring book for my thoughts and so I'm just getting my fingers moving and I'm just sort of tricking myself into making progress quote unquote and when I do that I find that then when I open the the a new Doc and I start writing the thing that I actually wanted to write that day I'm starting from just a clearer crisper place I've already warmed up it's it's the mental equivalent of if you go to the gym you want to stretch before you know you want

to go play basketball you should stretch before and so before you go play the game you want to let your brain stretch out a little bit and so I really encourage even if it's five minutes even if it's 10 minutes this is one of the biggest reasons I'm I'm an avid supporter of of journaling is I would just let yourself go don't censor yourself just let the words flow write about whatever comes to mind it it the words themselves aren't even what matters what matters is that you're just getting your brain moving and you're getting

your fingers moving and then after you do that for 10 minutes open the thing that you actually want to write and you'll just start from a cleaner place