Transform Your Writing Skills With These Easy Steps(Powerful Technique for steemers/bloggers with free ebook)

Hi Steemians, After I got to know about steemit, I realized to be more useful to this society you would have to be writing a useful blog post, not just that also get paid for writing good blog posts. Honestly speaking before I joined steemit I knew nothing about blogging or writing so I decided making research on how to write blog posts. I spent much time researching and I found the POWER writing technique used by most popular writers out there. POWER is an acronym which stands for this five step writing process which is very effective for writing blog posts, essay, newsletters, emails and any content.
P for Prepare - In this stage you are collecting the ideas of what you want to write.
O for Organize - In stage you Structure the ideas collected into an outline
W for Write - In this stage you will expand your outline to produce sentences from them as the first draft.
E for Evaluate - EVALUATE In this you will check your draft to see how effective it is and also proofread it for any errors.
R for Review - this is the last stage where you will add the finishing touches to make sure that what you have written is ready to go out to the world.
When you divide the process of writing this way, you are not only dividing into different stages but rather you are separating the different mental functions you need to perform when you write.
The Prepare and Organize processes are sometimes called Prewriting Process whereas Evaluate and Review are sometimes called Post-Writing.
By separating your writing process this way this will be able to focus your mind one step at a time and then move on to the next step through the process. Now let’s dive a bit deeper on how to go about the POWER Process to write amazing articles and contents.
PREPARE (brainstorming)
This is the first and probably most important stage. The purpose of this stage is to brainstorm ideas, thus to collect many ideas as possible that you can use in your writing. Many people fail to write because they skip this stage or did not do it well enough. If you fail this stage you probably won’t have enough ideas. This stage is vital. Your job is to get all your ideas down. Collect as many ideas as possible. In Prepare stage do not discard or reject any idea. Don’t worry about organizing ideas for now. Don’t focus on structuring ideas and should not be worried about your grammar, punctuations, spellings or anything. This is because if you do anything at this stage it will interfere the process of getting more ideas.
Don’t stop until you feel you have no more ideas.
Here are some few rules to take note of in this process:
• Note down any idea that comes to mind.
• Don’t leave out or discard any idea.
• Don’t worry about organizing or structuring your ideas.
• Don’t worry about your grammar, punctuations, spellings etc (no editing).
• Don’t stop until you feel you have no more ideas.

    TECHNIQUES FOR BRAINSTORMING

• Write down the ideas you get in a list by typing them on your pc or using a pen and a piece of paper. For short pieces of writing such as emails or letters, you can type from your computer, tablet, smartphone etc. For longer articles, you can take a piece of paper and write down your topic in the center of the page. Put your ideas down in points form anywhere on the page. Even though anyone works for any kind of writing. Remember to keep writing until you have no more ideas. Once you are done with this stage you will not have to worry about what you are going to write.

• If you are having hard times coming up with ideas for your writing you can apply the WH technique. “W” stands for the five “W” questions we commonly use in English.
  • What
  • Why
  • Who
  • When
  • Where
  • “H” is for How
  Let’s say you want to write about fitness and don’t know what to write, you can ask yourself some few questions like,
  • Why should people exercise?
  • What kinds of exercise should people do?
  • Who needs to exercise?
  • Why would lifting weight help?
  • When should people go to the gym?
  • Where should people go if they need more information?
  When you are having a hard time coming up with ideas, you can ask yourself these few questions.

The final technique is free writing. This technique is used by most professional writers to overcome what is called writer's block. Thus when you feel you don’t have any ideas anymore and can’t write. Here is how you do free writing.
When you are having a hard time coming up with ideas:

• First set a time limit could be 1 minute or whatever amount of time you are comfortable with but don’t stop writing until the time limit is up.

• If you absolutely can’t think anything you can write, just write “I can’t think of anything” until the time is up. This exercise is just to free your mind up.

     ORGANIZE (outline)
  

This is the second stage of the writing process. Thus organizing your ideas. In this stage, I will show you few process to structure your ideas to produce an outline. After brainstorming and collecting ideas you can now structure them or outline them. In this stage, you should have some ideas written down ready to organize. You should only organize after brainstorming.
There are two reasons why you should arrange your ideas:

• Your writing needs to flow logically. If you want your writing to be effective, it needs to flow logically. It should be easy for your reader to follow the flow of your idea from start to finish. Your writing should be well organized and well connected.

• It is very difficult to organize ideas and write at the same time. It is difficult to write and organize at the same time which doesn’t work very well. This is why it is very important to separate the two things and structure your content before writing. This is the same reason why we separate the Prepare stage and the Organize stage. At the end of this stage you should be able to create an outline of the final project. By now you should have a clear structure for what you are writing.
  Since our main aim here is organizing our ideas, throughout this stage ask yourself, how do I guide my reader which is the main focus of this stage. Here are few tips on how to guide your readers.
  How do you guide my readers?
  Think of yourself as a tour guide who is going to take your reader on a guided tour of the topic.

• What should your reader read first?

• Where should he or she go from there?

• What should the reader read last?
  Understand that the whole purpose of structuring our ideas is to guide our reader. To do this you can go back to your raw material and strike off any irrelevant or unnecessary ideas. This is the place to decide which idea to include in your final project and which idea should be left out.
  Now that we have all the ideas we are going to include in our final project, next step is to go back and mark all important ideas. The reason we want to do this is that the idea you mark as very important will form the topics of your paragraph when you write. Once you are done, arrange or sequence these ideas logically in the order that you want them to appear. You can do this by numbering them. After going through all these processes you need to come up with a good outline.
  How do you know it’s a good outline a good outline?
  A good outline will satisfy two conditions;

1. A good outline must have all the ideas you need for writing (you might add or remove a few ideas as you are writing and that’s ok).

2. Your outline needs to be structured and flow well and the relationship between the ideas should be clear.
   

After finishing the outline it’s a good idea to go over the whole thing and check if it fits these two criteria and if it doesn’t you should go back and work on your outline either adding or removing ideas or rearranging them till it makes sense.
Now after this if your outline satisfies both of this conditions, then we have now what we call a BLUEPRINT to begin writing right away. This makes the whole process of writing extremely easy. All you need to do now is to go to each point in your outline and begin to expand it into full sentences.

        WRITE

If you did everything right in the last stage, you should now have a full outline for writing a letter, email, essay, blog post and more. Now what you have to do at this stage is to expand your ideas into full sentences for your reader. In this process, we will look at the most important things to keep in mind as you do this including how to write a paragraph.
In this stage you are only writing a rough draft, which means that you are now expanding your ideas into sentences and paragraph but not really making any editing or anything, if there are mistakes, just leave them and we will come to make corrections to them in the next stage. What you just have to do is to write full sentences. Now choose your first idea you outlined and write some sentences about it and every idea related to that main idea will all be contained in the paragraph. In this stage, if you want to add or remove any idea that’s totally fine, feel free to revisit the Prepare and Organize stage. Never worry about how many paragraphs you need and what to put in those paragraphs because this depends on what you are writing and how long it is. What you really have to think about is what information to put in your paragraphs
And here is how you do it:
A paragraph is a single unit of information. Which means that each paragraph should have one topic and that topic should be developed in that paragraph.
Steps to writing a good paragraph:

• First, decide what the topic of the paragraph is.
• Second, put this topic at the beginning of the paragraph.
• Explain the topic using related ideas in the rest of paragraph.
• Remove any irrelevant information.
  Why Paragraph?
• Makes your article easy to read.
• Another thing to pay attention to is the use of linkers. Linkers are words used to connect ideas. Examples of linkers are but, and, although, however, first, second, this, that, these etc.

        EVALUATE

In the evaluate stage of the POWER writing process, you generally need to look at four things in your draft. These are:
o Content
This refers to the message and the effect you want the message to have on your reader.
o Structure
Has to do with how the ideas are connected and how the message is organized.
o Language
This refers to the words and phrases used to convey the message in other words, how you say it.
o Formatting
This refers to the layout and the appearance, simply how it looks.
The best way to evaluate anything is to look at it in the order of arrangement above.
First look at the content because it is the most important thing about your writing. After writing you need to ask yourself,
Does it have the desired effect on the reader?
what you have to do this time is to read what you’ve written from the point of view of your audience.
( think and act as if you were the reader and read writing from the audience or reader’s perspective)
General questions you can ask yourself when evaluating:

• Is your purpose clear? ( this is important for any kind of writing )
• Have you covered all the important point or have you missed anything?
• Is there any irrelevant information that can distract the reader (repetitive info can bore the reader)
• Are all your ideas clearly explained? Is there anything else you can do to help the reader understand better? For example, you can add data or examples or pictures or illustration but make sure it’s appropriate and explains exactly what you mean.
• Is there anything you need to correct, such as errors?
• Is the tone appropriate to the audience?
• Could anything be offensive to anyone? ( if you are not sure about anything if its offensive or not just don’t use it)
• Is your writing the right length? For example, if you are writing an email and want to keep it short.
  STRUCTURE
  When it comes to the structure it’s made up of two things:
  • Organization: this refers to the way your ideas or points are arranged. So the question is, are your ideas are arranged logically? Thus does the content flow from start to end smoothly. Read it from your reader's perspective to see if you get stuck anywhere and see what you can change to make it flow.
  Depending on what your writing especially an essay or blog post, check to see if:
  There is a clear introduction and conclusion?
  Have you used enough paragraphs?
  Does each paragraph have a clear topic sentence?

• Linking: How well you do this will determine how effective your writing is. This has to do with how well your sentences are connected, we correct these using connectors or linking words. As you read think about whether a reader reading what you’ve written for the first time will be able to follow the flow of your sentences.
Here are some questions you can ask yourself:
Have you used enough linking words?
Have you used accurate linking words?

LANGUAGE:
Here you should check your grammar

• Grammar

• Vocabulary

• Spelling

• Punctuations
  We look at these things to ensure that our writing is clear or we didn’t make any careless mistake to confuse the reader or make our writing look unprofessional.
  Important things to look at here are:

• Are your sentences easy to understand? Though it’s a good thing to have complex sentences if you have a choice between simple and complex sentence then you should choose the simple sentence are easier to read and very powerful. Use easy to read sentences.

• If you find any complex sentence in your writing try to simplify them to make it easier for your reader.

• Are your sentences grammatically accurate? Make sure you read your sentences individually to catch any ungrammatical sentences that might have slipped in. Don’t rely so much on softwares like Microsoft word or alternatives out there but rather take your time to read your writing because most of these softwares are not smart enough and not so reliable.
  VOCABULARY
  This Includes the words and phrases that you use to convey your ideas.
  It’s important to pay attention to your choice of vocabulary. The most important thing to consider when it comes to vocabulary:
  Is your user vocabulary clear? Is there anything that can confuse the user? If so change it. Is there a good variety of vocabulary? Check to see if you repeated certain vocabularies too many times, try to use a variety of words such as similar names and similar words. Is your spelling and punctuations accurate throughout? Remember to take your time to read.

  FORMATTING
  Refers to appearance and layout of your content. This is important because good content means high readability for your audience that means a good content should be easier to read and high readability is high audience.
  Few things to pay attention to:

• First of all without reading anything just take a step back and look at your content, would you like to read this yourself if you were the reader? Is it not ugly? To control this you can break down your information to paragraphs and you can add headers and sub headers to help your readers scheme your writing.

• Can you put anything in a bullet or numbered list?

• Does your font type make your content look good?

• Is there enough spacing between the lines and paragraph?

• Have you highlighted important ideas?

• Have you used consistent formatting? Thus the formatting looks similar throughout your writing?

REVIEW
This is the last stage of the power writing process, at this stage you just have to take your time to go over your draft one last time just to make sure it reads correctly and well. The final review is very important just to make sure your content reads well overall and ready to be sent out.

Why you need to review your writing?

• To check if your final draft has the intended effect on the reader.
  Few tips for reviewing your writing;
• For short writing like email and letters you can just take a quick read before sending but for longer contents, it’s a good practice not to read immediately, Leave it overnight and read it the next day. If you don’t have that much time, at least wait for few hours go and do something else and then come back and review it. This works very well because if you just wrote something at any moment, it sounds very familiar to you and therefore you might not be able to notice anything that might sound out of place or awkward to your readers. When you come back later, you will be able to read it as if you are reading it for the first time and this would help you to make any minor corrections you may have missed in the editing or Evaluate stage.
• Another important thing to take note of is, when you are reviewing anything, read it out loud, don’t read it in your head. Read it out as if you were talking to your audience. This is the best to see if your writing sounds natural and flows accordingly. You can record yourself as you read and play it back to see if it sounds natural, if it doesn’t, make changes until it does. You could also ask your friends or family to review your work for you. Now with this you can write powerful contents.
  Thanks you took your time to read this post, I hope it help you write better content. In my next Post, I will share with you how to apply this method on an essay, letters, email newsletters and etc.
  Thank you for reading and I hope this article helped you. If you love this and think this post is useful kindly support me with your upvote, also follow me and expect more better post from me.
  Here is an ebook if you want a copy of this post.
  https://www.mediafire.com/file/8b830jqv37iouqd/POWER%20method.pdf
  Gooday!