No matter what type of writer you are, writing quality content is everything these days. Nowadays, quality content is one of the top important elements that help drive traffic to any website.
For your words to be understood just as you wanted to, you need to keep your content simple and to the point. No matter how passionate you might be about expressing yourself with written words, there are a few common writing mistakes that can totally ruin the way you put your ideas together into an article.
Here are the most common writing mistakes and how to avoid them and strengthen your writing skills:
Table of Contents
Long introduction
Writing a long introduction is a very common mistake made by writers who only focus on reaching a certain word count. Not only that sometimes the introduction bores the reader and stops them from moving forward with reading the rest of the article, but it also brings no value to the content.
The introduction of your article plays an important role in allowing your reader to know what the article will talk about in the next paragraphs. However, disclosing too much or too little information in the introduction can make the audience stop reading within seconds. While a long introduction creates no sense of urgency and rather bores the reader, a short introduction leaves the reader in confusion.
Not understanding your readers
Not taking time to understand your readers can make you start your article off on the wrong foot right from the beginning. If you fail to determine the type of people who are going to read your content, you won’t be able to deliver an article that is suitable for their level of knowledge about a certain subject.
You need to know whether you address an expert who is looking for a few tips to improve their work or to a novice who barely knows anything about the subject. Understanding your targeted audience is the best way to create engaging and valuable content.
Writing in the passive voice
Writing in passive voice is another very common mistake made by writers. Compared with the active voice, the passive voice leads to an impersonal tone of the content which sometimes makes the article too dull. It can make the content less comprehensive and more difficult to understand by your readers.
Passive voice is considered to be more appropriate for scientific writing where the writers use complex concepts and the targeted audience is often defined by experts. However, for articles that must be easy to understand by the readers, who can often have very little knowledge about the subject, active voice is certainly recommended because it gives a friendlier tone.
Repetitive words
Repetition in your text can totally ruin your article. Although repetition can play a huge role in drawing your reader’s attention to a certain point of view, it can weaken the entire body of your article.
Repetition in content writing comes as a result of the fact that, subconsciously, we all hang onto some words more than others. We may like how they sound or we may find them very relevant in expressing an idea or concept. However, when you use those words for way too many times in your article, your readers will start losing their trust in your text. Overusing some words into your writing piece can show to your writers that you find it difficult to communicate or to explain the subject.
Luckily, avoiding repetition in your content is easier than you may think with the following tips:
- Read your text out loud
- Look for synonyms
- Rewrite the entire sentence
- Break a long sentence into two
Ambiguous sentences
What makes you a very skilled writer is whether or not you succeed to make your readers understand your words. No matter what subject you may be writing about, you have your ideas very well defined in your mind. However, the way you put them in words for your readers plays a huge role in creating high-quality content.
Ambiguous and long sentences are very difficult to follow by your readers, especially if they are novice about the subject of your article. Long sentences also tend to discourage the audience to continue reading the entire article, especially if they find it difficult to understand your ideas right from the beginning. Your writing style should be simple and concise to make sure that whoever reads your content will be able to understand the main idea of each paragraph.
Moreover, what distinguishes low-quality content from high-quality content is the value that the text brings to the reader. If your ideas are not meaningful and don’t answer to the queries of the audience clearly and completely, your text will most likely be perceived as irrelevant.
Take time to proofread your content
The most common and biggest writing mistakes that lead to poor-quality content is not proofreading your text. Everybody can make mistakes while writing, whether it is a grammar, spelling or style mistake. However, proofreading your text is vital to identify and correct them before publishing your article.
Proofreading is essential not only to correct any potential grammar or spelling mistakes but also to make sure that the message of your article is clear and comprehensive. Publishing content that has a multitude of style, grammar or spelling errors can make your readers lose their trust in your text and expertise about the subject of your article. To make sure that your content is 100% mistake-free, you can look for a professional proofreading service such as Trust My Paper. Also, you can use online free proofreading tools such as Grammarly or Hemingway App.
Lack of conclusion
Another frequent writing mistakes made by writers are not making a conclusion paragraph for their article. Lacking a conclusion can make the article end too abruptly and leave the reader hanging over an idea.
The conclusion paragraph needs to wrap up all the ideas you have stated in your article. Only 2 or 3 sentences are good enough to tell the most important ideas you want your readers to keep in mind. There are two golden rules in creating a good conclusion including keeping it short and not adding any new concept in it. If your conclusion contains an idea or concept which you have not mentioned before, it will remain a question mark to your audience.
How to identify high-quality content?
Distinguishing high-quality content from quality content all comes down to a few elements that make an article be meaningful and add value to the reader’s knowledge. When researching a certain subject for writing your own article, it is also important to identify great quality content that you can use as a reliable source. Here are the top elements of high-quality content:
- Engaging text
- Uniqueness
- Has a personal tone
- Offers valuable information
Keep these mistakes in mind and do your best to avoid them by paying more attention to each element that brings value to an article. No matter how good of a writer you are, there is always plenty of room to improve your writing skills. These common writing mistakes often appear as a result of inattention. However, they can really ruin the quality of your content and make your readers lose their interest and trust in your words.
About Carson Derrow
