I am often asked ‘how will I know if my writing is improving’?
It’s an interesting question; perhaps, you’ve been writing several times a week and sought feedback from a friend or a writing coach and yet, you’ve not noticed any improvement.
That can be discouraging and some people will stop trying to develop their skills.
In education, ‘fossilisation’ occurs when a person’s skill level has reached a plateau and they can no longer improve.
But not everyone, including the JMP Writing Coach, agrees that fossilisation is a permanent state. Instead, it might be time to try something new.
No one can promise your writing will improve, not even a coach, but they can be ambitious for you and help you to address your writing differently, all to see what happens next.
A turning point: you ‘notice’ the changes needed
Here’s a question for you.
When you reread what you have written, can you see how it could be better? Do you know how to improve it? And when you read other people’s writing, can you identify the steps they could take to make it better.
As your writing skills develop as you write often and receive quality feedback, the significant leap you might take is that you begin to ‘notice’ where you writing can be improved. You also begin to recognise the steps you need to take to transform an earlier draft of your writing into a piece that is easier to understand and effortless to read.
Importantly, you ‘notice’ without being told by a coach, by anyone, where improvements can be made.
In other words, you have taken a giant leap. You are acquiring a new skill, learning how to self-edit your writing. That skill will develop over time as you increasingly become better at recognising how to adjust your words, sentences and paragraphs to ensure they provide the building blocks for you to write, to say, exactly what you mean.
