5 Habits that Degrade Your Writing
Even if a story is great, these five things might annoy readers or make the writing come off as unprofessional or juvenile. As a writer, it is your job to create a story that immerses your reader. If there are mistakes in it, that can break the moment and make your reader lose the immersion. This is something you want to avoid because you want the reader to keep on reading. That’s the whole point. Right? Many people say you can make mistakes and that’s okay, so they are not bothered to see them while reading (and of course, we do make mistakes!) but you do not want to ruin the reader’s experience at all. This will only hurt your writing.
Habits that can degrade or lower the quality of your writing can obviously be bad grammar and spelling but let’s look at more specific mistakes. Are you ready to get annoyed at me once again? Don’t worry if you do any of those habits because writing is a creative learning process. You will make mistakes, you will make poor choices, and that’s okay! But making mistakes does not mean you are bad at writing. It is important to recognize your mistakes and see them as opportunities to improve. Keep on practicing and keep on writing!
1.) FREQUENT USE OF ALL CAPS
Spelling details or sensory moments out in all caps can be a way to surprise your readers and really make a sound stand out but this is not to be overdone. If you use all caps with many lines of dialogue and tons of sounds, I—the reader—will think you do not know how to express these things any other way. Also, if you write a lot of text in all caps, it’s eventually going to become repetitive and no longer as effective as you wish it to be.
Example 1:
Don’t do this:
“HEY! Give that BACK TO ME!” Julia said. BAM! She threw a toy at Sam.
Try this:
“Hey! Give that back to me!” Julia screamed. She threw a toy at Sam.
By getting rid of all the caps, the sentence is simplified. I changed “Julia said” to “Julia screamed” to get more meaning out of the dialogue tag. This removes the need for all caps. Knowing that the toy was thrown is all we need to know too. We don’t need the “BAM!”
Example 2:
Don’t do this:
“GIVE IT BACK TO ME!” Julia screamed.
“NO! I NEVER WILL. I NEVER WANT TO BE YOUR FRIEND AGAIN!” Sam responded.
“HOW CAN YOU SAY THAT TO ME?!”
“BECAUSE I HATE YOU!”
In this example, if everyone is screaming the whole time in every line, it actually weakens the moment. It’s like using “!’s” in every single sentence. If you use them every time, they soon become nothing different than a period. Use strong dialogue marks sparingly (including all caps) because the less you use them, the more powerful those few instances will be. Let’s think about what the most important pieces of information are revealed in these lines and make them stand out with all caps to show you how less is more.
Try this:
“Give it back to me!” Julia screamed.
“No! I never will. I never want to be your friend again,” Sam responded.
“How can you say that to me?”
“Because I HATE YOU!”
Now… isn’t that last line more powerful than in the previous example?
2.) Elongated Onomatopoeias
Onomatopoeia is a hard word to spell. This word is for words that imitate and spell out a sound. For example, the sound a sad child might make is “wah” or thunder and lightning will make a “boom.” These are common uses for an onomatopoeia but there are many ways to overdo it and create wordy distractions that no one really wants to read. Be sure to avoid overkill by spelling out and elongating words. I most commonly see these bizarre elongations in niche fetish NSFW work—but come on. You can write better than this.
Don’t do this: “AAAAAaaaahgggh!!”
Do this: “Aah! —”
Don’t do this: “WAAAaaaaahhhh!!!”
Do this: “Wah!” or “Waaah!”
Don’t do this: “BAAAAAM!”
Do this: “Bam!” or “BAM!”
I guess you can argue that this doesn’t get the point across but I’m going to say it does. Spelling out sounds or exclamations like grunts, yells, burps, hiccups, sneezes, crying, and more is too overdone. If I open a story and see the dialogue all wild like this, I will close it. Try to think of better spellings or more accurate ways to create these situations, noises, and moments. A rush of repeated letters and capitalized letters is not going to do it. It can come across as lazy.
3.) Dialogue Punctuation
I know I said I wasn’t going to talk about punctuation and grammar as something to improve in your writing, but I must bring up one. The most common errors I see in my editing work is incorrect dialogue punctuation. I’ve written an entire WWW on this so be sure to read that and learn more.
Link: Wednesday Writing Weeklies: Dialogue Tips
4.) Everything is Extreme
When writing, be sure to avoid cliché assumptions or descriptions of extreme attributes. The most beautiful character, the strongest person, the evilest villain, and the most impossible mission… the idea of being the most bad, good, or crazy gets boring because it’s been done so many times. One thing is right about these details, the “impossible missions” sure are impossible because I’d rather read something realistic.
Regardless, instead of simply going for the “he was the strongest warrior in all the land,” show us how strong your character is and how he overcomes challenges that the reader sees. Instead of saying that a villain is so bad, show us by their actions instead. If everything is at level 100 the whole time, the intensity will become boring with little to no variety. The story needs a rise and fall in action—not a story that is super intense all the time.
5.) Bad Pacing
When writing a story, it’s important to write out a plan and know where your story is going. Outlining or planning word count can really help with this but its good to be aware and make sure you take your time and avoid dragging the pace. Give yourself time to establish the scene, the character, and the situation before things change and begin to develop. Be sure to show things as they happen and not just tell the reader what is going on.
Another important part of pacing is to avoid skipping important parts in the story! Let’s say your story is about a fight between two characters. You spend pages building up to this moment but in the rush, the story goes blank, and the next page is already at the aftermath of the fight. Your reader will be very confused and all that work you put into building up the climax will have gone to waste. When these moments happen, I think of two things: 1. The writer did not plan out what was going to happen or 2. The writer did not know what to write here so they just skipped it.
Conclusion
That’s about all for this week! In short, be aware of the choices you make in your writing and don’t be afraid to try new things and see where you can improve. While I do call these choices above “mistakes” they really are not “mistakes” to begin with. They are choices or some things that might have been overlooked but, in the end, it is not something you are doing wrong. Don’t beat up yourself over it, that’s not my intention! I hope pointing out these five things can give you an opportunity to look at your own writing and see how you can continue to improve and grow.
Best,
Danni Lynn, Evangeline40003