Just a quick writing tip that I am working on myself. It is a habit that I would encourage anyone to break if they are doing something similar.

Whenever I take notes on paper I like to use a blank sheet of paper. I find that lines cause me to not use as much area on the page because I can randomly add parts to the page until it is completely full when no lines are there – it’s a somewhat chaotic process. So when I started taking notes on the computer often times when I would be writing I would not correct my mistakes just to get ideas out faster. I wouldn’t spell things correctly, punctuation was not an issue, all the typical grammatical rules were out the window. It was a just a free for all. To this day, I have a Scrivener file that is so huge and filled with random broken English half crazy ideas that I really don’t know what to do with.

I think this is a problem that originally started with text messaging. I can remember people giving me shit whenever I would send a text a message because I would send in it a broken txt styl englsh. At the time, I would think to myself that it wasn’t really worth typing out the full and proper English because I knew that I could type a good message if I wanted too, I was just lazy.

So here I am now and the lesson that I have learned is to not get lazy with spelling and grammar. When you work on your writing projects it will save you a boat load of time not having to go back and correct spelling errors and grammar mistakes. You might not think that it is really a big deal, but when you have to go back and edit something that is 50,000 words or more you will appreciate when chunks of text that are spelled correctly and look good.

That is where I am today. I am working on all of this stuff and trying to get better at it every day. There is one benefit of a more disciplined writing habit is the fact that typos will naturally occur less if you are working on the constant correct spelling and punctuation on the words the first time around. This will save you more time writing and send your up productivity levels once you start seeing content build up. Content that is quality and somewhat polished that you might want to share it with people. That is why you might what to start to a blog or any other writing project.

So next time when you are thinking about writing something, try not to rely as much on spell check. Consciously make an effort to improve you spelling and punctuation skills. This might just be something that I am working on, but I can guess I’m not the only one that has gotten into bad habits.