There are not a lot of people who actually enjoy the act of writing. Ask any author if they enjoyed the process of writing a book. There’s a reason they call it a book baby; it’s a labor of love. No, most authors enjoy having written, but they often don’t enjoy the laborious process of writing itself. Maybe you don’t consider yourself an author or a writer and so give very little thought to refining your writing skills. Maybe you’ve published 12 books already. No matter what you do or who you are, here are 8 reasons to improve your writing skills.
1. You’ll be more valuable in your current position
There are very few jobs that require zero writing skills. I work a lot with engineers, who spend more time writing reports, emails, contracts, and other miscellaneous documents than they spend doing actual engineering tasks. Chances are, you have to respond to emails or write reports or do other various writing tasks for your job. Employers love having an employee that they know will represent them well in the written word. Improving your writing instantly makes you a more valuable employee.
2. Your efficiency at work will improve
I can’t tell you how many emails I’ve agonized over before pressing send. Improving my workplace writing skills made me so much more efficient. I can work my way through my inbox in no time, sending professional and punctual responses. Win-win.
3. People will perceive you as more capable
It can be frustrating when people’s (often misconstrued) perceptions affect the tasks your assigned, position you’re given, or reputation you have. The fact that this might feel unfair doesn’t make it any less true. The more effective you are at communicating, the more likely people are to think that you are capable of doing good work, even if said work has nothing to do with writing.
4. You’ll have a greater influence
Whether this be in social media or business, improving your writing can help you become more influential for the things that you care about. The person who can state to their boss in clear terms why they need extra funding and what they can do with it is more likely to get it than the person who loses his train of thought, distracts his reader with grammatical mistakes, and misspells his boss’s name. That’s an extreme example, but you get the idea.
5. You’ll be more marketable
Refining your writing skills will make you more marketable, whether it’s for a promotion, freelance work, or a new job. This is true not only because your employer will be able to get writing tasks done well, but if you’re a better writer, you’re more capable of marketing yourself. The benefits of improved writing skills keep multiplying.
6. You’ll seem more dependable
Have you ever pulled up a promising looking article about something important, like how to find health insurance or change the oil in your car, only to find it littered with spelling and grammatical mistakes? How fast do you click away from that site? I realize that spelling isn’t as important to everyone else as it is to me, so maybe you would stick around and see what they have to say. But I promise you that there’s a good chunk of the population that will immediately dismiss the author because of those mistakes. Making sure that your writing is on point makes you seem like a more dependable source of information.
7. It gives you a sense of authority
You know the person on Facebook who posts this really long post in text lingo and bad grammar? Compare that to a person who posts on the same exact topic, with the same point-of-view. but with great writing. Which one would you rather read? Which one would appear more knowledgeable to you? The one with better writing would. Part of this is because it makes it seem like they care more since they took the time to use proper English. Part of this is because better writing makes a person seem more educated, and therefore more capable of giving sound information, whether this is true or not.
8. You’ll have better writing skills for life
Once you really absorb those skills, they stick with you. You’ll continue to have more open doors and better communication skills going forward, which is never a bad thing.
Learning to improve your writing skills is certainly challenging. Now that I’ve convinced you that it’s a challenge worth accepting, hop on over to this post to read more on some quick tips for improving. Refining your writing skills as a whole is not something you can do overnight, and you’ll probably need to enlist other people for help at some point. But don’t shy away from all the hard work it will require. As you can see, it will pay dividends in the future. Tell me, what was one way that you were able to really improve your writing?
