Designers and other creatives are often maligned unfairly for lacking when it comes to writing skills. In this article we share 4 Ways to Develop Your Writing Skills as a Designer.
Regardless of whether or not this is true, there is always room to improve one’s written communication. With that in mind, below are 3 ways to develop your writing skills as a designer.
Table of Contents
Word Games
A great way to build your writing skills while also having fun and stimulating your brain is to play word games like Scrabble, a classic that has stood the test of time since the middle of the 20th century.
Scrabble forces you to rely on your verbal intelligence to come up with high-scoring word combinations, but there are Scrabble hacks used by the pros to help memorize difficult words when you get tricky tiles like Z and J.
There are also word unscrambler tools like Unscramble X that allow you to input a series of letters and be shown all of the various word permutations that are possible with those tiles.
This tool can help you rack up winning combos when you first start playing and introduce yourself to words that you may not have been aware of that you can then use in your own writing.
Read More
All good writers are avid readers. If you want to improve your writing skills, the absolute best way to do that is to read more.
As you read, you consciously and subconsciously pick up words, phrases and syntax used by great writers and, over time, will be able to seamlessly integrate them into your own work.
Reading has the added benefit of being a mind exercise and also teaches you how to think.
Read for 20 minutes a day–while you have breakfast, on public transit or on your lunch break–and you will notice you automatically start to build a bigger vocabulary over time and find yourself better able to come up with alternative sentence structures and phrases to avoid repetition and make your writing more pleasurable to read.
Grammarly Pro
If you have been debating investing in Grammarly’s pro package for a while and are wondering whether it really does improve your writing, the answer is a resounding yes.
Grammarly Pro features a sophisticated algorithm that allows you to tailor your writing for different audiences and purposes, gives you synonyms and sentence structure suggestions and checks your text for readability.
Know When to Use Jargon
Jargon is very often the enemy of good writing, except if you are writing for an audience of your peers. As a designer, if you are communicating with a client–putting together a proposal, answering questions–avoid jargon and industry terminology that may only end up confusing them or prompting more questions, thereby wasting everyone’s time.
Good writing is clear and concise writing, which means going out of your way to eliminate confusion.
Conclusion
Written communication, whether you are sending text messages to friends and family, or communicating with clients is an important part of social life in the digital era.
Superior written communicators are better able to cultivate and maintain professional and personal relationships digitally, avoid miscommunication and misinterpretation and do a better job of advocating for themselves and their ideas.
If you are a designer, you may also find these 10 Steps To Writing The Perfect Logo Design Brief very helpful, or 6 Essential Steps to Writing a Graphic Design Proposal.
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