Writers: Talent is Only the First Step! Increase Your Readability Factor

Hi im writng this way to prove a pont this kindf writings very hardto read if shakspere himslef wrote like this he wouldnt B famous ROTLF!! im just ofering a sudjestion if u dont like it then GTFOOH.') LOLbye!!!

The phenomenally talented and brilliant writer F. Scott Fitzgerald received so many rejection slips for his first novel (This Side of Paradise) that he literally wallpapered his room with them. If not for one extremely patient and visionary editor, Maxwell Perkins, F. Scott's beautifully written prose might not be available to us today. Why? Because F. Scott Fitzgerald couldn't spell very well. His manuscripts were hard to read because of this purely technical problem. Most editors had way too much new material to read through without giving themselves a headache trying to figure out what the man was trying to say. We can take a lesson from this.

One thing that many writers forget to do is put themselves in the place of their readers. I read a LOT. I'm talking 3 or 4 books at a time, sometimes as many as 8 books a week. I love to read, and I love to read the material here on AC because there are some extremely talented writers contributing to this site. BUT...some articles, no matter how well expressed, I just give up on and skip after a few lines. The first sentence in this article is an example of why. Free form writing with little or no punctuation, rampant misspellings, run-on sentences, and unfamiliar acronyms meant to take the place of catchphrases or entire sentences gives me a headache. Reading is one of the great joys of my life, but it's hard to concentrate on what is being said by the writer when the flow is continually interrupted by these distractions.

Writers today have a huge advantage over F. Scott Fitzgerald: Spell check, Text editor, a thesaurus at the touch of a key, search engines, printers, and many programs that point out spelling or grammar issues. Revising a text nowadays requires very little effort on the part of the writer. Besides, I know you can hit that Cap key; all those emoticons give it away. :) ;) :O. Use it to begin new sentences , too.

One trick that Fitzgerald used to improve his writing was constantly rereading and revising what he had written. If a sentence ran on too long, he'd catch it on the re-read and break it up. Fitzgerald, despite his spelling issues, had an unerring instinct for sentence structure and flow. Reading over what you've just written, or asking a friend to read it out loud to you, can work wonders in revising text so that it reads easily and well.

Don't get me wrong; everyone lets a typo slip once in awhile. I'm not your high school English teacher, I'm just an experienced reader giving my opinion of what reads well ( to me) and what causes eyestrain and frustration. Think of it this way: if someone approached you and started talking like this on and on without stopping to catch a breath or let you get a word in edgewise and switching from subject to subject with no pause or segue between ideas and kept saying stuff like you know, J.I.C. I wanted some FCs I ran over to Mickey D.s and got a QP..." How long ago did you start to tune out? Reading stuff like that makes people tune out even sooner. The eye tends to skim down to the next paragraph, then the next, then...click. On to a more readable article.

Bottom line is: don't let your unique ideas and thoughts become obscured behind a wall of mistakes. As a reader, I assure you that I will only struggle on through no (or all) capital letters, blatant misspellings, acronyms ad nauseam, no punctuation and run-on sentences for a few seconds at most..and I have a long attention span.