In this article, I tell you some essential tips on effective writing. These tips will be useful for all writers, so keep reading!

Determine your Target Audience

When you write something, whether it’s a blog post or technical documentation, you write for somebody, that’s why you should determine your target audience first. The easiest way is to just imagine who will be interested in your writing — teenagers, office workers, professionals of different spheres, and so on. If you write technical documentation, you can gather a focus group to communicate with your target audience directly.

Research Properly

Do proper research on your topic. However, one of the biggest mistakes is using only sites such as Wikipedia or other pages as their sources. But the fact is these sites are often filled with inaccurate information and the information is not enough for high-quality content. Do your research properly and smarter so that it will show on your work.

Use Checklist

Checklists are the things that make our life easier and better because you don’t have to keep everything in mind. Checklists work well not only in daily life but also help to write high-quality content. You can just follow the steps and everything will be ok.

Keep it Simple

It doesn’t matter whether you write a blog post or technical documentation, your writing should be clear and concise. Сlickbait titles, content without a purpose and the like don’t work anymore, readers became pickier — they just want to get the necessary information and go, no one wants to decode your witty content. So, if you want to say something to people, keep your language simple.

Use the Active Voice

To make your content simple and readable, don’t use passive voice. Active voice makes content easy-to-understand, so a reader will get the main idea quickly.

Mind Your Grammar

It’s considered the big challenge because we’re all people and, of course, we can miss something. However, you should do your best to make your content better. For this purpose, use a grammar checker. Kesi Parker gathered a great list of the best ones: Top Free Grammar Checkers.

Design Your Writing

Nowadays, design matters a lot. It makes your readers think that you’re really interested in your blog and you do your best to create better content. Moreover, good design helps your readers understand your writing. Imagine a green background with yellow letters on it. It’s really painful. That’s why think over how you’ll represent your writing. For example, Medium provides some basic design opportunities but they’re minimalistic that’s always trendy.

Design is crucial in technical writing, as well, since it makes difficult documentation more easy-to-use. You can learn helpful tips on designing documentation from Kesi Parker’s article: How I Organize Documentation.

Ann Green, Content Manager at ClickHelp.com — best online documentation tool for SaaS vendors