Four Essential Writing Skills for College and Daily Life

Writing skills have value beyond English class. When you can write well, it serves you in all aspects of your life: not just essays and grades but text messages, work presentations, wedding speeches, personal statements, and many other situations.

But what are the most important writing skills, and how can we develop them?

This article outlines the four overlooked but essential writing skills for college and the rest of your life, providing examples and strategies to help you grow as a writer.

What are writing skills and why do they matter?

Writing skills are the competencies of vocabulary, grammar, punctuation, and structure that allow you to achieve your writing goals. As you read, write, study, and practice other strategies, you can develop these skills and gain more command over your writing ability.

Writing skills matter because they help you communicate better, regardless of the situation and your goal: to make your friend laugh, convince your coworkers to accept your proposal, connect emotionally with your audience, respond to a college essay prompt, or organize a presentation for your class.

But what skills are we talking about? Which ones transcend all writing purposes?

Four Essential Writing Skills to Practice

Four critical basic writing skills:

• Brevity

• Clarity

• Paragraph structure

• Paragraphing

Writing Skill #1: Brevity

Brevity means that your writing is concise, efficient, and avoids unnecessary words. Every word, sentence, and paragraph should serve a purpose. If your writing contains text that doesn’t contribute to your overall goal, delete it.

Not every word needs vital information—typically your goal is not strictly to inform but to also entertain, show authority, convey a tone or attitude, and build a connection with the audience. Words and phrases that add humor, background, or build an audience connection serve an important purpose.

But you should be aware of your writing purpose(s): Do you want to make your friend laugh? Analyze how The Lion King’s Simba and Prince Hamlet parallel eachother? Convince your mom to let you borrow the car? Show your boss the progress your marketing strategy made this month?

Identify your text’s goals, and make sure that every word builds toward them.

Strategies to Improve Brevity

• Identify your purpose: Consider the purpose of everything you write—whether its a quick text or an essay. Many times, you'll have more than one purpose. Reread your text searching for–and deleting–any words, phrases, or sentences that don’t move the text toward that goal, or that repeat the same idea unnecesarily.

• Avoid awkward phrasing: Read through your finished draft (out loud if possible), listening for phrasing that sounds awkward. When something sounds off, it probably uses inefficient language. Consider what you’re trying to say and if there’s a more direct way to say it.

Writing Skill #2: Clarity

Clarity means your word choice, phrasing, and sentence structure communicate your ideas as exactly as possible. When you articulate thoughts, feelings, and information, you should make all efforts you can to be specific and thorough.

Constantly consider your reader's perspective to identify where your ideas might be unclear, vague, or unifinished. You must learn to identify when to elaborate. Then, develop a toolbox of elaboration strategies, such as those below, to implement while writing.

To find the words and phrases that might be unclear, locate your most important ideas—the sentences and paragraphs that mean the most to your text. Ironically, your text's most important sections and words are typically the most likely to need clarification and elaboration.

When you’ve identified a part that needs chiseling or development, try out one of the strategies below.

Strategies to Improve Clarity

• Ask yourself “What do you mean?”: After each sentence you write, pretend there’s someone asking you What do you mean? Answer that question in the next sentence. Repeat this process until you’ve developed a coherent, complex idea over multiple sentences or a whole paragraph.

• Follow up with an example: Give a specific image, story, or piece of information that demonstrates your vague or unclear language. This makes your vague language more concrete and easier for your reader to visualize.

Writing Skill #3: Paragraph Structure

Paragraph structure refers to the way sentences are ordered within a paragraph. Your sentence flow guides your reader from one idea to the next, gradually building your message and guiding the audience to readers what you want them to feel.

The fundamentals of good paragraph structure apply to most paragraphs, regardless of genre.

General Rules for Good Paragraph Structure

1. A paragraph’s first sentence communicates the main idea. The opening sentence should get to the point and express the paragraph’s main point succintly This makes it easier for your reader to make sense of the more detailed sentences that follow.

2. Each sentence builds on the one before it. Each sentence should somehow develop the prior one. The first sentence introduces the key point, and each successive sentence uses details and examples to repeatedly elaborate—whether that's by clarifying, giving an example, explaining what you mean, providing evidence, identifying the significance, or something else.

3. The last sentence concludes the idea. The last sentence wraps up the idea by answering, Why is this important? What are the consequences or results of this paragraph’s main idea?

Writing Skill #4: Paragraphing

Paragraphing describes how you organize your ideas into separate paragraphs—where you end each paragraph and begin a new one.

Each paragraph should focus on one main idea. Just like sentences within a paragraph build one to the next within a paragraph, paragraphs link similarly throughout your text. A sentence within a paragraph is like a paragraph within your overall text.

Paragraphs keep your text organized by visually breaking your ideas into chunks, so your reader can do the same. When a reader begins a new paragraph, they mentally prepare for something that moves the text forward, that builds on the previous in some way. By keeping each paragraph focused on just one idea—and ordering them in a way where the flow makes sense—you make it easier for your reader to follow along.

There is no universal rule for how long a paragraph should be. Each paragraph will have its own length depending on how many sentences it takes to communicate the main idea. In general, paragraphs tend to be 5-8 sentences long. While mine rarely go longer than this, they often go shorter—I write a lot of two- or three-sentence paragraphs.

Strategies for Better Paragraphing

• Make an outline for longer pieces of writing: An outline is a writing organization tool that helps you break your text’s overall main idea into smaller chunks–paragraphs. By outlining, you create more coherent paragraphs because you know each paragraph’s distinct main idea ahead of time. Outlining also helps you order your paragraphs more intentionally.

• Know each paragraph’s main idea: When you write a text longer than a few sentences, approach each paragraph by asking yourself, What is this paragraph’s main idea? When you notice yourself wrapping up one idea and moving onto a separate one–begin a new paragraph.

Applying Basic Writing Skills in Your Life

If you make the daily effort to apply these writing skills—in emails, essays, presentations, texts, and the stories you tell—your writing will improve over time. Practicing clarity, brevity, and mindful sentence ordering will help your speaking, as well.

Your writing will improve as you strive to make it as easy as possible for your reader to understand your message. Break your main idea into coherent chunks, such as paragraphs and sentences, and structure these in a way that the reader can follow.

When you cut out unnecessary words and sentences, replacing them with examples and specific language that elaborates on your developig idea, you gain the ability to communicate more complex and important ideas.