How to Improve a Bad Piece of Writing Quickly

If you have a deadline coming up, using editing services is an affordable way to get peace of mind and improve your document. The purpose of an editing service is to help your readers digest your content – whether it is an essay, a blog article, or a book – in an easy and convenient way.

When you write a first draft of the document, it tends to be low quality in various ways. For example, the structure of the document may be poor, or the document may contain unnecessary repetition. For this reason, creating a second, third, and fourth draft of your text, ideally with the help of a professional editor, can refine it and make it publishable.

If you’d prefer not to use a professional proofreading service to improve your document, or if you’re simply curious about how experienced editors enhance your writing, this article covers some of the key tricks of the trade. Whatever type of document you have, you can quickly apply these tips to improve it.

 

1. Use varied sentence lengths

One of the hallmarks of poor writing – even text that is grammatically fine – is monotony. In academic writing, this can even be a problem, and it is important to address it during the document editing phase.

With this in mind, it is important to remember that you can minimise monotony in your document, and also increase reader engagement, if you mix up your sentence lengths.

 

2. Don’t overuse jargon

In academic writing, the use of jargon may be unavoidable. This is especially the case in technical fields, where documents often become bogged down by acronyms and terminologies.

If you’re not writing to an audience that deals with the jargon in their day-to-day affairs, it’s worth avoiding it. This can help your text appeal better to a general audience.

 

3. Favor strong over weak nouns

A strong noun (“pit bull”) compared to a weak noun (“dog”) carries a significantly greater impact in terms of imagery.

For this reason, if the document you’re working on suffers from a lack of description, replacing strong nouns with weak nouns can have a substantial effect in improving the writing.

In editing services for books and poems, changes made to the writing in areas such as this can have a dramatic and positive impact on the work.

 

4. Target the punctuation

As you check over your piece of text, make sure to go once through while focusing only on punctuation. Punctuation is frequently overlooked today, and many people are unfamiliar with the basic rules of grammar. For this reason, devoting some time to punctuation is worthwhile.