Are you a Mass Comm student or seeking to hone your writing skills? If you want to know how to become a writer, this 2023 guide has all the tools and resources necessary to accomplish your goals.

What are the writing challenges college students face?

When it comes to writing a paragraph for an essay or an assignment, students often procrastinate. The main reason is that they find it difficult to pen down their thoughts, opinions, and ideas! If you, as a college student, genuinely want to improve your writing skills then you need to be determined to do so and set realistic and achievable goals.

Initially, you may find this task extremely tedious and boring.  But as you will become used to it, writing will become a cakewalk. It might even become your passion! People who have been through this ‘how to become a writer’ journey share that it’s a gradual process and one should take it step by step.

How to get started?

Start today. Writing skills can only be improved if you keep practising writing daily and getting your piece evaluated.

Now the question is what should we write?

Writing tasks you might indulge in may include essays, articles, paragraphs, blogs, etc.

Today, writing website content is an important aspect of doing business as it is the only way for a company to put its products, services, and ideas in front of the public. Hence, a plethora of websites invite applications for content writers. The demand for content writers and content developers has successively increased in recent times. As students, you can apply for freelance offers or internships and take up an assignment to gain experience and hone your writing skills.

Another way to improve your writing skills is to make your own blog on your favourite topic and write something on it every day. This way you can indulge in the writing process and it is a fact that the more you practice the more you gain perfection.

At SMS Varanasi, we often conduct writing workshops for students who wonder how to become a writer. These workshops help students learn more about creative and effective writing. Joining them can also be helpful for you in sharpening your skills.

Resources and Tools You Can Use

If you are new to writing, don’t worry. Great things take time.

Be ready to be disappointed or rejected when you begin. In other fields, you might mug up things and achieve targets. But when you want to become a good writer, you need to have a good amount of knowledge and the ability to think clearly.

A lot of lectures are available on the Internet on how to improve writing skills but they won’t work unless you pick up a pen and start writing. Writing pros share that good writing skills require good knowledge and a good imagination.

Some of the resources that can help you with writing better are:

• Google Docs: This is a great tool to start writing on. It provides auto-saving so you don’t lose your work, plus you can share with others for easy collaboration.
• Thesaurus: A thesaurus helps you enhance word richness; it also helps in finding out similar words within seconds. When you are working on your vocabulary, a thesaurus can help you a lot.
• Grammar Checker (such as Grammarly): This tool helps in improving your grammar and accuracy. Even its free version offers you word suggestions and grammatically correct sentences along with the reasons behind them. Grammarly allows you to write in American English, British English, Canadian English, and recently, Indian English.
• Plagiarism Checker (such as Small SEO Tools): Plagiarism is a serious issue that can cost you dearly. A good plagiarism checker will help you detect any passages in your content which have been copied from somewhere else.
• AI Content Creator (such as ChatGPT or Google Bard): AI content creators help you to create unique, relevant, and high-quality content in just a few seconds. You can use these tools to come up with ideas for your writing pieces or even to generate complete articles. However, as a student, we do not recommend you to use this tool as it will erode your capacity to think on your own and come up with unique ideas.
• AI Content Detector (such as Copy Leaks): AI content detectors help you to detect whether a piece of content is written by an AI or a human writer. You should know that Google flags down sites which contain too much AI-generated content.

To write research papers, Google Scholar is a good search engine to find the latest and relevant research papers. If you need help with referencing and citations, you can use EasyBib for that.

6 Quick Ways to Improve Your Writing Skills

Remember, to become a good writer, one should be an avid reader. Here are some ways to improve your writing skills:

1. Write every day

Writing an article every day should be an indelible part of your routine. The more you practice, the easier it becomes.

You would find it hard to write on the first day which usually happens. Also, it might be the worst of your future work. But with time, you will definitely improve.

Practice daily and ensure your destiny. Write something every day, it may be an article, a blog or anything about what you are passionate about.

You will find the more you write, the more you will feel the need to polish your skills.

2. Understand your style of writing

Every writer has their own style of writing and that is what they are famous for. Famous authors like Chetan Bhagat, Khalid Hosseini and many more have a unique style of writing which they might have come up with by practising hard.

Similarly, you need to understand your writing style – and hone it well. To see different ways of writing, I will suggest you read the editorials of the national newspaper (such as The Hindu or The Times of India) in which they write beautifully and explain the details briefly.

3. Write something people want to read

In today’s world, every person has some doubts and is inquisitive. Take this to your advantage and resolve their queries by writing blogs and articles.

There are a plethora of sites for this purpose, such as Quora and Reddit. Quora is a site where some people ask questions and others answer them. This will not only help you to know about the opinion of other people of different age groups but also with clearing your doubts.

Reddit is another platform for gaining knowledge. You will find subreddits on every topic. Just join the subreddit and ask your questions or answer people’s queries as it also helps in improving your writing skills. Being a part of a large community where you can interact freely or share your experiences via blogs, articles, or comments – helps with improving your writing skills.

4. Keep it simple

If you keep it simple, you will be praised more for your writing. Using language that confuses others is not going to help as only a few people will understand.

Understanding the level of your reader and what he/she needs is important if you want to write something your target audience is asking for. If you write something and others don’t read it or understand it, it is useless working on it.

Do not get diverted while writing. Be focused while writing an answer irrespective of the topic or field you are writing about.

5. Use an online editor

Using a professional online editor is one of the best ways to polish your skills. It enables you to know about your grammatical errors and also about the problems in your writing. We mentioned Grammarly above, which is one of the best online editors.

Use your preferred online editor to learn how to use your punctuation marks and conjunctions correctly.

6. Get yourself evaluated

As discussed above, getting evaluated is one of the important steps toward improvement.  Show your writing to your friends, teachers and colleagues and ask for feedback. Improve yourself accordingly and make a new version of yourself.

So, friends, these are some of the best ways to improve your writing skills. If you do it continuously for a month then no one can stop you from becoming a good writer.