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Till the age of 32, I did not know what good writing meant. Nobody taught me or demanded it from me.Throughout my schooling (in Kendriya Vidyalaya) and college, ‘quality writing’ was not even a thing. I doubt if even any of my English teachers knew how to write well. Essays were just meant to fill the pages with words (e.g., write a 1000 word essay on blah…).Working in the IPS further wrecked my writing skills.Here is a typical Sarkari communication - “Your kind attention is drawn to the reference cited. Your good self may kindly be pleased to take appropriate action. I will be highly obliged if the undersigned could be informed about the outcome.”Full of passive voice, verbosity… you name it.For my MBA applications, for the first time, I had to tell a story. Since I was competing with a global pool of applicants, I was forced to up my game. That was my first attempt at good writing.At McKinsey, I could further sharpen my skills since I spent as much time on writing as on problem-solving.I still have a long way to go, but here are a few lessons. I am assuming that the reader already has the basic grammar and composition sorted.Let us start with a few hygiene factors:Omit needless words:I picked this from Strunk and White’s classic on writing. Unnecessary words are like dust on a glass window - they muddy up the beauty of your writing.A few examplesInstead of ‘In order to achieve our goals’, just say ‘To achieve our goals.’Don’t write ‘In my opinion, we should do blah…’ Just say ‘We should do blah…’ Your writing is your opinion, anyway.Use active voice: Instead of, ‘The project was done by two interns,’ make it, ‘Two interns did the project.’Cut down the use of adjectives/adverbs: Don’t say, ‘The exam was very hard.’ Just say, ‘The exam was hard.’Show, don’t tell.“The journey to the peak was an arduous climb” - this ‘tells’ the reader, who has to recreate the feeling in his head.“Halfway up the journey, my calf muscles were on fire” - This is better as the reader can feel that it was arduous. We don’t have to tell.Stick to the rules, but not all the time. When you break the rules, it should be intentional, and it should hit the reader.The above will make your writing clean and easy to read. But to make people cry or laugh or angry, you need to give it some punch.Here are a few suggestions:Edit mercilessly. The punch comes from editing, not from the first draft.Ask yourself, ‘What is the key point.’ Delete all the other words. Then add back words only if they really change the meaning. See example below:A bad, verbose example: “Based on the facts and our past experience, we have a few corrective actions to recommend. We suggest that the client at least starts with the following three initiatives - A, B, and C.”.Better, tighter writing: “To conclude, we recommend three initiatives - A, B, and C.”After a round of editing, take a break and come back after a few hours, or a day. You will be surprised at the number of mistakes you will catch.If you are just starting, try cutting down the word count of the first draft by 50%. Trust me - it will become better.Some people say ‘Write only when you are angry.’ Don’t wait for the right mood, but feel the rage, the excitement, or the fear if you want to move the reader.Specifics over generality:Instead of saying, ‘The affluence level in country A has gone up a lot in the last 50 years’Try saying something like, ‘Today, every family in country A has two cars on average. Fifty years back, only the king had one.’Don’t be afraid to offend. Don’t please everyone. Hit hard.Storify it. Facts and data don’t move people. One thousand people dead or 100,000 people dead - it is just a few more zeros. But stories evoke emotion.E.g., the Syrian civil war killed lakhs, but it did not move anyone. But the photo of Aylan Kurdi, a toddler who died when his family was immigrating, changed the sentiments of Europe towards Syrian immigrants. Before that, tens of thousands of kids were killed, but nobody cared. Why? Because we can relate to stories but not statistics.Before I finish, here is an important disclaimer:I am not a professional writer. My training is in Finance and Engineering. Hence please treat the above as learnings of an amateur, and not an authoritative set of rules.In summary: Write a lot. Edit brutally. Cut out the junk. Feel the rage. Tell the story. Don’t dilute. Write fearlessly.Best wishes- RajanNote: I removed the photo of Aylan Kurdi since some readers found it distressing. But we should ask ourselves, why?Lakhs of people have died in Syria, and yet we can easily close our eyes to that. But one story has the power to change the way we think. Remember, closing our eyes does not change reality. It only hides it from us.

First off, the fact that you want to improve is terrific! English writing skills are vitally important if you’re thinking of going on to further education in an English-speaking country, or you want a job that requires English. Here is a list of six ways to improve your written English.1. Read lotsEven without physically writing, you can improve your writing skills. By reading as much as you can, you’ll develop your vocabulary and understanding of how English is used. We don’t mean that you should be studying syntax and sentence clauses—simply read for pleasure, and you’ll pick things up subconsciously! You could start with the English version of your favorite book, or work your way through these classic novels. And by the way, if you need extra encouragement, Joseph Conrad, the author of Heart of Darkness, didn’t speak English until in his twenties and became one of the most celebrated English novelists of all time!2. Write how you speakThis doesn’t always apply, but you can generally improve your writing fluency and readability by simply writing how you speak. That doesn’t mean writing lots of slang words and uh, eh, and er. But think about how people use simple English when they speak and how natural it sounds, and aim to give your writing the same easy flow.3. Learn new wordsIt goes without saying that to write with more confidence and fluency, you need to expand your vocabulary. If you haven’t done so already, start a personal dictionary. Any words that you come across that you don’t know, write down and translate, then test yourself on how many of them you can remember, and start using them in your writing and conversations.4. Make writing a daily habitAs the saying goes: practice makes perfect. So the only way to improve your writing over time is to keep doing it. Even just 5 or 10 minutes a day, if done every day, will really help you improve your written English. You could keep a diary in English, or write a blog about your experiences learning English and living in a new country, or even start writing your social media posts in English.5. Form follows functionThere are lots of different types of written English—diaries, essays, CVs or résumés, poems, short stories, tweets, and so on. It’s important to consider what type of writing you are doing and its purpose (its function). Also, think about who will be reading it and what you want them to do. When you know the function, you can adapt the style.6. Check for mistakesWhen you write something, the last thing you do is carefully read it to make sure it makes sense and you haven’t made any mistakes. Always, always proofread your work.The free Grammarly browser extension can also help you to improve your written English immediately, by actively checking for grammatical and spelling errors. Grammarly Premium can further bolster your writing skills through readability and vocabulary enhancement suggestions, as well as genre-specific writing style checks.

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”So said Ernest Hemingway, who knew a thing or two about pouring one’s élément vital onto a blank page. I wholeheartedly agree with the late Mr. Hemingway in the sense that I don’t think writing ever gets easier. I do think, however, that with focus and a bit of dedication, it’s certainly possible to improve tremendously over time.Without further ado, here are three tips on how to write like your life depends on it.1. Don’t let your thoughts be limited by your vocabulary.When I was in high school, I used to memorize SAT words.I had a list that I’d pull from—the 500 hardest, most commonly missed words.Aberration. Abeyance. Abject. Abstruse. Abnegation. It was all Greek to me at first.But after months of daily memorization, the words started to stick.I got really good at taking apart critical reading passages and contextualizing difficult words. Eventually my efforts paid off beyond my wildest dreams, and I ended up with a great score on the SAT.Beyond the immediate benefits of acing a test that required an extensive college-level vocabulary, I was now a high schooler with an extensive college-level vocabulary. This didn’t earn me any cool points with the boys, but I could now read and understand more difficult material without having to look up all the words.That’s when a golden nugget of insight hit me. I realized that all these words I’d memorized weren’t just “SAT words.” They were just words. Words that existed in the world. Words that literate people knew how to use, with flair.No more flipping through vocabulary flashcards as a dreaded chore. Every unfamiliar word I come across now is a precious learning opportunity.So next time you come across a word you don’t know, don’t skip over it. Remember that words are the foundation of your writerly bandwidth—that you can only think as far as your vocabulary. Treat each new word like your new best friend.2. Use reading as an excuse to hone your sense of beauty.Whenever I read a phrase that really resonates with me—a clever snippet from the New Yorker, a sly remark from Vice, a beautifully wrought metaphor in a book—I always write it down.Doing this has not only made me a better reader, it’s made me a better thinker.It forces me to critically examine how the information was presented. It cements interesting insights into my mind. It trains my brain for faster recall, giving me easy access to the best parts of everything I’ve read.Perhaps most importantly, it hones my sense of beauty, so that I can recognize and appreciate good story-telling for what it is.I’ll give you a line that I read recently, written by Milan Kundera in 1984.He could have talked at length about how bothersome she found the music, about how she couldn’t sleep at night, how it tortured her, how she couldn’t escape. But why mince words? Why not have ten times the visceral effect on the reader by planting the image of a pack of bloodthirsty hounds, being sicked on its prey?That’s the mark of a good writer—elegance in simplicity. That’s why we still read Milan Kundera today.Tricks like these are everywhere, as long as you care enough to seek them out. So while I absolutely agree that it’s important to read a lot, it’s a lot more important not to read blindly. Find writing that strikes a chord. Notice the aha! moments you experience, the little word-gasms you get from reading. And write them down.The more you seek out beauty in your reading material, the more you’ll seek it out in the world at large. Eventually you’ll hold your thinking to higher standards, and your writing will follow as an extension of your thoughts.3. Understand that your writing needs a reason to exist.This point is so important that I’ll illustrate it with a ten-second fairy tale.Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess. She had rose-gold tresses, cerulean eyes, and a tiara encrusted with a thousand shimmering gems. Like all princesses from time immemorial, she also had the gentlest of dispositions and a heart of gold.But underneath all her glitter and grace she had an aching loneliness that nobody knew how to cure—not the doctor, not Prince Charming, not the King or the Queen, not the fortune teller or the astrologist or the mystic, not even God Himself.Then one day, she was visited by a faraway philosopher. He gently takes her hand and asks, “Princess, why are you here?” And the princess is quiet for a long, long time.“I don’t know,” she finally muses.And with that, she dissolves into stardust and fades away.What the princess was missing all along was a reason for being. You’ll notice that I never gave her one. I used her as a gimmick to practice my descriptive writing—to prove a rhetorical point. I never thought about why she existed, who she was under the surface, or what made her tick.But nobody likes a careless creator. Even fairy tale princesses need a reason to exist.Purposeful creation is the secret ingredient behind every good story, something you need for the magic to work. Like love or sentimentality, you can’t always pinpoint what it is, where it is, or why it’s there. But when it’s there, you just know.And in writing, as in life itself, when you have a reason for being, the rest will fall into place. You’ll find a way to tell the stories closest to your heart. They’ll come pouring out of you, fully formed. You’ll be throwing everything you have into the darkness, hoping to land among the stars.After all, there is nothing to writing.All you do is sit down at a typewriter, and bleed.