I dug into the pages of How to Write with Flair to learn techniques to include in my blog post. Now, the Question is- has our writing style changed as a result? For me- Writing with Flair pushed me to identify areas of improvement and present me with suggestions. Although there was a lot of good information throughout the book, three chapters really stood out to me.
Lesson 1 resonated with me because I tend to use words like am, was, were, and does. The author challenged me to transform my boring sentences into more engaging ones by adding strong verbs. Coming up with strong verbs on my own is not always easy; so, the list of 500 words has been a life saver. Anyone else finding that list to be as useful as I do?
Another lesson that caught my attention was the second lesson: Secret Ingredients. Typically, my writing comes off as bland since I write paragraph upon paragraph with no stylistic changes. No colons. No semi-colons. No dashes. Just lots of commas. I really never knew how to use a semi- colon before; now, I use it often to break up my connected thoughts. As a heavy comma user, learning how to effectively use commas has been important to improving my writing. Now, knowing how to use semi-colons limits my use of commas; providing more diverse punctuation. The diverse punctuation is very important as you can see in the chart below; it shows how little punctuation such as semicolons and colons are actually used. This second lesson really helped broaden my punctuation usage.
Finally, Lesson 4: Garnishing my work- has positively impacted my writing. I really enjoyed learning the different ways to write with more personality. What is my favorite technique of all of them? Using self-answering questions. What I like about “garnishing” is that it can be different for everyone. The self-answering questions technique spoke to me more, but a different technique might speak to you more. I also didn’t realize how much power repeated first words would have. I used it in my 4th blog post and could not believe how effectively it grabs the audience’s attention.
Overall, I learned a ton from reading How to Writer with Flair.The sections on strong verbs, advanced punctuation, repetitive words and self-answering questions jumped out the most to me as I powered through the book. As you can see in the graph below, there are many different forms of business writing, and through reading the chapters, I can use what I have learned from letters to emails. As part of my revision process, I now go back to see if I have included these techniques and if not- add them in.These lessons as well as the others will be beneficial in my future writings. So-what about you? How has your writing style changed?
The use of self-answering questions in this writing is something I found very amusing that I would love to incorporate more into my writing. To me, they’re one of the funniest devices that we learned that is a perfect way to display more personality while very quickly getting across a point you want to make. While this device is extremely effective, when setting up this device how do you determine when it is appropriate? I want to use the device more I recognize its strengths for a casual audience but am curious concerning the limitations for its use in more serious situations, if it can be used at all in them.
I agree with you that the author of “How to Write with Flair” challenges the readers to improve their writing skills in unique ways. I have also tried to incorporate repetition in my writing for a rhetorical effect and practicing “self answering questions.” I have found that sometimes using repetition makes the reader focus on the main message of the piece and self answering questions helps the audience look from a different perspective. The second lesson of the book also helped me understand the power of punctuation within writing. Before reading “How to Write with Flair,” did you know when to use certain punctuation marks? Personally, I tried to play around with the placement of my punctuation after reading the chapter and I learned when to use certain punctuation.
I think it is really cool that you included the graph of the frequency use of punctuations, it is a perfect reflection of how many people write without the secret ingredients. I think I really benefited from your post because I keep messing up on how to use the punctuation or just forget to incorporate it in my writing. I guess my question is if the punctuation are important, then what do you think the reason is that we are not using it so often?