My Views: Ways to make your writing more interesting to read

After studying a piece of journalism and academic writing and engaging in a group discussion with my tutorial group, we found some key ways to make our work more interesting to read.

Visual evidence (graphs, diagrams and photographs) really hold our attention when reading a piece of writing as it creatively displays a key concept or idea a text is trying to explain. This makes the text more varied which keeps the reader engaged. My academic article I explored on globalisation made use of a lot of rhetorical questions which engages the reader by involving them. Tailored language to make it more accessible for target readers is also important because experts can be bored by concise summaries whereas beginners may be put off by multiple uses of complicated and technical language. Sentence length and writing structure is also important in order to keep the reader engaged and not bored. Sentences need to be succinct with key points made clear as opposed to waffling on as this will help the reader understand the writing and thus be more interested. Structure is essential, without it a piece of writing can be confusing and the key point of the writing may be confused or lost. One idea raised was the use of subheadings and we all agreed that we did find this very helpful when reading academic and press articles.

In terms of content, we also discussed that radical ideas although they can be memorable can be very frustrating to read and can put off the reader. We agreed that we preferred even debates in writing as opposed to one-sided bias perspectives with no consideration for other opinions. This is important in engaging the reader as it can entice them to read further in order to learn more about other points of view on the subject. That said, radical views can leave a lasting imprint on a reader’s memory as mentioned by one of the members of our group however it can leave a reader livid afterwards.

Looking at Orwell’s rules of writing, we came to an agreement that writing needs to have a balanced view on a topic as well as a perfect balance between concise beginner level writing to expert work. Writings which are too concise with lack of depth and length can be extremely disengaging to those who have a small knowledge of a subject. Furthermore, Orwell’s statement of using more everyday words as opposed to scientific words can be off-putting when writing academically as your work can be seen to be unintelligent and lack depth.