Finding your writing style is like having a skill that can season your words from weak to wonderful. Each of us has access to the same alphabet, 26 letters and not a vowel or consonant more. It’s what we do with our selection of sounds that lends the greatest strength to our voice. Having a toolbox filled with a few succinct tips might be all you need to push your prose a little closer to perfection.

Writing with the right style can render your language more precise. Precision = Power.

You may believe you are already writing with clarity, your words ringing with the clear chime of a chapel bell and loudly declaring the depths of your soul, but others might only be hearing a faded warble of your heart’s true song. The difficulty in defining style lies in it’s subjectivity. Every person will approach your prose with a different perspective, each of them having a different idea about what makes for interesting style.

Everyone places language in their own unique packaging, yet there are a few clear choices when it comes to finding your finest voice. Pick a few of these tips, memorize, and you’ll be wielding words in a whole new way before you even know it.

Color Outside the Lines. It’s cool to be messy. You can rarely ignore conventions, a comma is a comma and even Stephen King can’t make it otherwise, but staying fixed on the same rules that echo through the halls of grammar school probably won’t win you a Pulitzer, or even a Newbery for that matter.

Give Your Thoughts Breath. Nothing is perfect the first time through. Period. If you labor over your work, sentence by sentence, you will never allow your ideas a chance to spill over the lip of restriction. Write, pause (if you must), keep writing, repeat. It isn’t always easy and you might make a mess, but you can always clean up later. It is far more important to unleash your thoughts than it is to get them perfect.

Read Your Work Out Loud. I know I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. Sometimes our words read differently than our thoughts. Reading our work out loud affords our lips a chance to catch the errors our eyes gloss over. It is best to read out loud to an audience, but the best way to know if you’re writing has voice is to use the one in your throat.

Be Authentic. Never try to sound more intelligent than you are. That’s not writing with style, it’s writing with embarrassment. Write naturally and your innate intelligence will surely shine through. Though it is tempting to try to gild your words with intellect, it is almost always a mistake. If you wouldn’t use a word in a spoken sentence, you shouldn’t use in your prose.

Cook without a Recipe. The best chefs, even when cooking from an index card, can also cook by taste. Instinct is (by far) the most important ingredient for finding your unique writing style.

Pay Close Attention to Your Tone. It isn’t only what you say, it’s how you say it. Tone is important and knowing your audience is key. Your reader should feel as comfortable with your words as they are engaged by your rhythm.

Creativity is Borrowed. No one holds copyright on thought. Plagiarism is theft, but we are each the aggregate of every book read, movie seen, or conversation heard. No one in the world shares your exact canvas of experience. Use what’s in your head. Don’t worry about saying something that no one’s said before, just make sure you say it in your own way.

Write every day. The patch of land that gets the water is the soil that swells with life. The only way to improve a skill is to practice. Those who write without routine are less likely to be writing with consistent voice than those are arranging words within their sleep.

Believe. Writing with style won’t happen if you don’t believe in your topic. Believing in yourself comes first. A common fear among writers is that they will run out of things to say. Don’t allow the fear of running low on ideas paralyze you. The well of ideas is bottomless, but you must lower the bucket to draw from its depths.

Know What You Mean and Your Reader Will Too. Readers know when their author lacks confidence. Daily speech is filled with um’s and ah’s. Writing is no different, often stuffed with more than its share of this’s and thats. Cut the fat. Choose clarity over word count. There is always room for beautiful prose when you make it, but you must mow the lawn to highlight the garden.

Your arrangement of words gives voice to the thread of your thought. Every writer will develop their own tool box of 2 or 10 or 20 tricks (or ticks) that will help tickle their text and transform it to terrific. Mine is alliteration.

Finding your style will give you control, controlling your prose allowing the reader to truly hear what you’re saying. It isn’t always easy, but is always worth the effort.

The Collective Inkwell Community Question: What methods do you use to give your work voice and inject it with style?

Sean Platt is a dad and ghostwriter who also tweets.

Though I love reading blogs, I sometimes read them from behind the eyes of someone who makes their living with language. Writing great copy is important, and much like a special effects artist who has a difficult time losing themselves in a film, it is sometimes hard for me to ignore the nagging little details that keep a writer’s words from speaking as clearly as their author intended.

It isn’t punctuation or lack of mechanics that bother me. I’m a writer, but even I think English is a bit confounding, carrying more exceptions than rules. Yet there is, I believe, an essential truth to blogging. Blogging is about communication. Effective communication is reliant upon clear ideas and lucid delivery.

A writer must situate their words in a way that makes the reader feel like they are adjacent to the writer, listening to every word while never once wanting to interrupt. These seven steps can help you take your copy from crusty to clean.

1) Be willing to ramble before you can wrangle. Your thoughts might lie in a tangled mess, but you must get them out of your head and onto the screen before you can start sorting. The first draft is not a time to measure perfection, it is a time to write. Editing comes next. If you can construct your thoughts with perfection the first time through, then perhaps that is an indication the value of your content isn’t quite as high it could be. Revision while writing is a pillow on the face of pure thought.

2) Edit your words as though someone else wrote them. Every word isn’t golden and word count doesn’t matter. It is the density of ideas that will make your writing remarkable. 250 or 1250, make every word count. I promise you, there is fat in your first draft. Cut it.

3) Not just lean, but strong as well. You’re off the treadmill, now head to the weight room where a few key changes can pack a bit of power in your prose. Stay far from weak words, opt instead for vocabulary with muscle. Us, are, were, it – these words cast with abandon will cause your copy to grow timid. Strong words are the scaffolding to a strong voice. Own the action. Use active language rather than passive.  For some examples of correct passive versus active language, check out this page.

4) Don’t attempt to sound smarter than you are. I would guess every beginning writer does this. I know I did, but I drank from a bottle when I was a baby too. My general rule, never use words I wouldn’t use in regular conversation. Stephen King has a law I rather like. “If you had to use a thesaurus to find it, you’re using the wrong word.” Artfully arranged and long winded are not the same thing.

5) Read out loud. I don’t publish a word on any of my blogs until I’ve read the copy out loud. I read my highest profile stuff to my wife, but I’ve no qualms about splitting the silence of an empty room in exchange for incredible copy. Invariably, my mouth catches much of the minutia my mind’s inclined to miss.

6) Print it out. My writing partner, David prints his stories while editing, a trick he learned in the newsroom. Reading on the computer screen can become tiresome and many of us tend to gloss over mistakes that would stick out in print. Print your copy, mark it up, then dip in for one last online edit.

7) Stay True. Be yourself. Like it or not, everyone else is spoken for. If you try to write for an audience of everyone, you will be lucky to be writing for an audience of anyone. Writing to please a fickle public is a slippery slope with jagged teeth of slate at the bottom.

Collective Inkwell Community Question: Do any of these seven steps ring true to you? What steps would you suggest for getting your copy squeaky clean?

Sean Platt is a ghostwriter and father, who believes life’s better with the right words.

Writing wisdom is for wee ones too! Are you happy with your child’s writing? Sign up for early information on Writer Dad’s upcoming Writer’s Workshop, and learn how you can help give your child a limitless life.