Improving your prose has always been in that “write better” category of skills development.

Sure, we’d all like to write better prose… but how?

In today’s episode of Write Bites, I’m going to break down four practical ways you can improve your prose over time.

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In today’s episode, I’m going to give you four different strategies that you can use to improve your prose over time.

And the keyword there is time. These are not overnight processes.

In general, improving prose has kind of always been in that “write better” category of skills development, where I can tell you “Hey, your prose is weak” or “You need to work on your prose”, but what do you actually do about that?

In a lot of ways, how we write prose is not about a conscious strategy that we’re following.

It’s more of a subconscious way in which our brain is processing thoughts into words.

And so improving the way that that happens is not easy.

That said, I’ve noticed some correlations between people who tend to write better, more engaging prose and people who really struggle with it.

And so I’m going to be focusing on those things in today’s strategies and trying to make something that is not typically actionable a bit more actionable.

Today’s episode is sponsored by Copy.AI,  a toolkit that helps writers, marketers, and freelancers, skip writer’s block completely and quickly create first draft copy for themselves and their clients. Head on over to copy.ai/jacob, and you can get a full 30-day free trial.

Tip #1: Read More Fiction

Number one – the most enjoyable, in my opinion – read a lot more fiction.

Now, I have noticed a very strong correlation between people who are heavy readers and people who have great prose when they’re writing. And this shouldn’t be a surprise.

Like I said before, prose is more about how your brain processes ideas into words. That is how your brain is going to understand words and ideas: through the prose that you’re engaging with.

This is obviously easy for me to say. I came into the space as an avid fiction reader. I’ve been reading my entire life. I currently read one to two fiction books per week.

it may not be that way for you, but I’d say if you’re not someone who’s read a lot of fiction, I would strongly encourage you to do so. Particularly if you are wanting to improve your prose.

I notice a lot of people who come into this space – not really from the writing side, but more coming in from the marketing/money side – the thing that appeals to them about freelance writing is more of the career potential.

And while there’s nothing wrong with that, one of the defining factors I see with a lot of these individuals is they haven’t done a lot of reading.

When they come into this space, most of what they are reading is business books, and business blogs and things like that.

And there’s obviously nothing wrong with that. Obviously I write a lot of business blogs, myself.

But the style of writing that people tend to use in business books particularly is… frankly, shit.

It’s terrible prose.

It’s mediocre writing.

A lot of times it’s mediocre content and you are not going to become good at prose by reading business books.

If your brain learns to process words in terms of a business book, your prose is going to be weak.

Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t succeed with weak prose.

I actually have some students who I would consider to have somewhat weak prose, but they are very good at focusing on substance.