Forewords: Writing is easy, but writing for the others to read and understand as they’re wearing your shoes is different.
If you’re going to start your freelance service as a content writer or just simply run a personal blog, you will need to answer the following questions.
Who is your audience?
Writing is the process to express your thoughts and feelings through words that others can read and understand.
Depend on your reader, you will need to find a way to describe your topic, explain it, in order to clear the barrier between you and your readers.
If your audience is the children, and your topic is about science, then writing in the academic style won’t fit, but “Explain Like I’m 5” will help.
Understand your audience, not only help you have a better look in the writing style, but also save your skin in your article structure.
What is your article structure?
Let’s say you want to write about a technology how-to tutorial, you already portraited your audience as the non-tech savvy people, then, what’s your structure, to make your article really help those people?
This part of the writing process, involve mainly the imagination and thinking.
As mentioned, that how-to article only helpful when the reader can apply and solve the problem. So, if you’re going to find a solution, what would you look for? Here are some questions I might have when finding a solution
- Is it for me? Is the author have the same problem as me?
- So you will need to describe the problem in a few words
- What is the solution? Will the solution fit to my knowledge and skill?
- In short, what’s your solution? Does it require a lot of skill and knowledge?
- A table of content to help the reader easily read what they want first.
- What is the result? Is there any way to prove that this article help?
- Show the reader your result, in text, in the image, in the video.
Don’t write when you’re not thinking enough about your topic.
You spent time to write, so, why don’t we write better, right?
How you express ideas through the image?
A picture replaces a thousand words, you can either describe your idea through words or just an image.
There’s no need to have a premium stock image, it can be the handwriting sketch or just the simple clip art, anything that fit, as long as it’s meaningful and related to your heading/content.
A tip that might help is add the picture after a few words, like this.
How to write faster in foreign language?
Searching around, you will see the most common recommendation for this point is practice.
Only practice can help you write faster, it’s true. But how to practice?
The core problem of writing in the foreign language is the thinking process.
Usually, you will think in your head, you will write in the native language, then translate to the language you want to.
That’s not gonna work, unless you sift the native language process. This will require a lot of practice and hardwork.
So, there’s the easier way.
Instead of removing the native language process, you will write in dual language.
At first, you will find it take longer, but time to time, you will see the improvement in your writing skill, such as smooth paragraph transition, less duplicate words, use suitable words,…
That’s it.