How to be a writer — or are you one already?

Melissa Wardell | August 16, 2016

Many of us may reserve the title ‘writer’ for outwardly obvious professionals like novelists, journalists, or those employed to write industry-specific documents or content. But that’s not doing justice to almost everyone else out there whose job requires them to sit at a keyboard (or in front of a smartphone) and communicate through the written (or typed) word. And how many of you out there don’t do exactly that?

If you’re reading this blog post, you’re almost definitely a writer

You may follow our Write Clearly blog, or you may have been sent a link to the blog in one of our weekly newsletters. Or you may have found this blog post because you were at your desk Googling something like ‘How to write a communications plan’ and you came across our website.

Whatever the case, if you regularly write to communicate in your role — by email, via text message, or through specific documents — you’re a writer. Yes, you AND Stephen King.

Image, Hand writing 'I am a writer'.

Are you are writer already? Image by Ramdlon / CC0

But you have to be trained in writing to be a writer, don’t you?

Actually, yes. And you have been!

What was one of the first things you learned at primary school? Writing! Your teacher got you to hold a pencil (‘Pinch and pull, dear’) and put that pencil to paper. That was your first step to becoming a writer. And depending on your career, you’ll have been adding to those skills ever since.

Image, Hand holding pencil and writing.

Writing. Image by Vassilis / CC BY-SA

I agree with writer and author John Weirick that we’re all writers in the twenty-first century. In today’s world it’s almost impossible to get away from writing to communicate. But we can’t forget that there’s a difference between writing to get by and writing to achieve organisational success. And that’s why we at Write exist.

Where honing writing skills improves productivity

While the basic writing skills we learn at school set us up to communicate in everyday life, the modern work environment often requires us to hone our abilities. An organisation’s bottom-line very often depends on the ability of its employees to write and communicate effectively.

Here at Write we’re acutely aware of the need for clear, professional writing. That’s what our company’s all about! One of the measures of a business’s success is how well it communicates. We enable organisations to enhance their writing, because when you write well in business, you do everything else better.

Through our training services, we get to meet lots of those writers whose job title disguises their role as a writer. We train an enormously broad range of professionals — from executive assistants and policy advisers through to team managers and CEOs — who all need to write clearly every day.

With our document services, we polish and refine documents that have already been created, to ensure the documents meet their purpose.

Insights, tips, and professional development opportunities.