Writing good headlines is one of the most important skills you can develop as a writer. Headlines, after all, are your come-hither attraction — they do the job of luring the reader into your story. And that’s true whether you’re writing advertisements vying for attention on a busy page, a blogger writing posts that compete with thousands of online content daily or a magazine writer hoping to get your human-interest story noticed.

Five Minutes Collecting

This exercise involves collecting all the best headlines you find five minutes at a time. Since it’s not that easy to scan through thousands of content, your best bet is to go to places where well-written headlines are almost always the norm.

We suggest going to Digg and the BBC News website. The former because stories with well-written headlines are almost always the ones that rise to the top of the Digg charts; the latter, because the BBC has been the most consistent news source when it comes to putting out concise and informative headlines.

For the next five minutes, collect at least five headlines from each of those websites. Note how few words these great headlines normally use, all while managing to tell an informative gist of the story. Just the habit of collecting and being exposed to them can end up affecting the way you write your headlines later

Five Minutes Writing

You can alternate the “collecting” exercise with actual headline writing practice. In this one, you write your own headlines for existing stories for the next five minutes.

We suggest going to your favorite blog, taking the first five stories in the front page and creating your own headlines for them. Don’t cherry-pick your stories — you’ll just end up defaulting to stories that will naturally fit your preferred headline structures. Instead, pick a busy blog that gets a dozen or so updates a day, then take the first five stories on the page, whatever they may be.

• Use whatever techniques you noticed employed in the headlines you collected that can be applicable to each story. Additionally, try to adhere to the basic principles of good headlines.
• Keep it short. Twelve words or less. If you can do five words (as the BBC is so talented at doing), all the better.
• Make it rich in informative clues. You can’t tell the whole story from a headline, but you can offer a decent summary with clever use of word choice and arrangement.
• Load it with the right keywords. The most important keywords in the story should appear in your headline, as that contributes immensely to the summary.
• Keep it predictable. What’s implied in the headline should be what the story is about. Forget all that clever trickery. People will appreciate straightforward and informative headlines better every time.

Want to put in some practice time writing summaries? We suggest doing this five-minute exercise. You can do it once a day, twice a day or more — even with just a single daily session, though, it can foster serious improvements in your writing skill set over time.

Good Summaries

Pick up a popular broadsheet newspaper in your area. Turn to the editorial pages and look at the stories. Often, the editorials will be introduced by a short summary that distills the entire argument or opinion in 20 to 30 words.

Often, these summaries will open with a statement that grabs attention, like a startling statistic, an interesting fact or a provocative opinion. That way, the reader is quickly hooked in with the promise of something they can actually care about. At the end of the summary, notice how it closes with a transition to the actual editorial. Take note of the various elements of the summary — sentence length, sentence structure, word choice and such.

Doing that should clue you in on what makes good summaries. Take notes if you feel like you need to write down some of your discoveries. Later on, you’ll use them when writing your own summaries.

You can do this for five minutes a day for the first week to prepare you for the actual writing practice.

Summary Writing Practice

The actual practice session goes like this:

1. Find a short story in a newspaper, magazine or on the web. Start out with op-ed pieces as that’s what you’re using for basis (i.e. the summaries you reviewed earlier). Later on, as you get more comfortable, you can move on to other types of writing, such as features and stories.
2. Read it and write three summaries. Yep, three different ones using different introductions, bodies and endings.
3. Read each one aloud. How do they sound?  Are they snappy and on-point like the ones in newspapers?  Or are they dragging and just a little unclear?
4. Just think about that for the remainder of the time. Let it sit in your mind, without you having to think about them consciously.
5. The next day, for your next five-minute session, you will write a new summary for the same story. You will finish it, review it, revise it and finalize.
6. Do over for the next two days after.

Doing this trains you to write summaries fast — as you did while whipping up those three right after reading the story. However, it also trains you in letting things percolate. The second day, there’s a good chance the best version of the summary will flow right out of you, as the story and the summaries you’ve written for it have all had a chance to sink in.

If you’re serious about getting good at writing, then you’re writing all the time.  Well, maybe not all the time, but you do it much more than the average person.  You write with regularity, investing more of your free time practicing the craft than engaging in other things.

Writing, if you want to make a serious go of it, requires daily attention.  Not every weekend and not when you feel up to it, but a regular part of your every day.  Just like a bodybuilder won’t build serious muscle hitting the gym once a week, you won’t get anywhere doing the work sparsely.

Just as with any other endeavor, writers need consistent practice to get better.   Writing once a week usually isn’t enough to foster the continuity you need to build the skills.   That’s why every writing book tells its readers to set aside time — even a short block of it — every single day to writing.

If you can’t discipline yourself to write regularly, you’ll have a hard time getting serious writing work.  Want to write for a publication?  You’ll need to produce content on a regular basis.  Want to write books?  You’ll be working on a deadline.  Want to write technical papers for businesses?  Yep, those people need things to be on the clock.  For those who want to be writers, writing regularly isn’t just about improvement: it’s practice for the kind of working challenges you’ll face down the road.

Looking for a way to improve your writing with practice?  If you’re a big reader, you may want to exercise your chops by doing summaries of the stuff you read.

Say, you’ve just finished a couple chapters in a new book you started and you have a little free time to indulge in some writing practice.   Instead of finding exercises from the internet, you can just go ahead and write a summary of what you just read.  Doing so carries plenty of benefits in developing both your reading and writing skills.

• It forces you to pay closer attention when you read, so that you can retain enough information to put together a decent summary.
• It takes your mind back to what you just read, keeping the information fresh in your head and likely to stick for longer.
• It strengthens your sense of structure in writing, as you’ll need to understand how the original authors organize their material, develop their points and transition among them.
• It helps you appreciate the key points in materials, since those will form the core information your summary will include.
• It trains you in organizing material for summarizing — something you will likely do when you write certain types of materials, such as persuasive articles and essays.

Regularly writing for your job is not the same as deliberately practicing writing exercises.  The former compels you to write in the most efficient and effective way possible.  The latter is only concerned with developing your skills.

When you do regular writing, it’s not uncommon to plateau in the skills department.  You tend to rely on the tools you’re masterful with, after all, so there’s a good chance you won’t develop anything new to add to your toolbox.  That’s why deliberate practice is so important for working writers: to many, it’s the only way to really improve in your craft.

If you’re looking for writing exercises to periodically take, here are a few suggestions.

1. For the most part, choose exercises that force you to focus on the details.  Many intermediate writers can benefit from such exercises, as they require you to get up close and personal with your subject.  More importantly, they train you to focus on the small things — something a lot of writers can actually benefit from.
2. Occasionally, you should try exercises that involve imagination.    Broadening your mental horizons can help writers of many kinds, even those who aren’t so inclined to writing fiction.   Imagination breeds creativity, after all, and all writers can benefit from a little more of that.
3. Try choosing exercises that set word-count limits.  Most of the real-world writing you will do will involve conforming to specific lengths.  The more you practice that, the better you will get at estimating both your subject and your first draft for word count concerns.

Want to be a better writer?  Start out by becoming a better reader.

Reading voraciously may seem like a passive activity.  We’ve been accustomed to think of skills improvement in terms of study and repetitive practice, after all, such as taking classes and working with a writing quality software.  However, reading can do so much to sharpening your writing skills that you’ll be foolish to ignore it.

Ever read something you really liked and sat down to write something different?  Then, halfway through your writing, you suddenly realize that your work mimics the style of that piece.  From the words you employ to the choice in phrasing, you end up imitating the author of what you just read.

That’s the effect of reading good prose.  You absorb it.  Reading a lot won’t just help you work out your comprehension muscles, it helps you build up your vocabulary, find new ways of presenting ideas and discover new styles of effective communication.

Being a good reader is the first step to becoming a better writer.  The more you read, the more nuances of the craft of writing you absorb.  Before you know it, you’ll be surprised by how much of those nuances you’re suddenly able to integrate into your own writing.

All the experts say the same thing. When you want to improve your writing abilities, you have to “practice, practice, practice.”

If you can’t come up with exercises to polish those skills, here are three general-type writing activities you can engage in right now. Yes, right at this moment, so you won’t have anymore excuses.

a. Pick out a news item from an online newspaper and rewrite it. Go to Google News, find some random article and write it in your own words. No need to fret about style or whatever, since only you will read it. Just read the piece and put it down in your own words.
b. Turn on the TV. Watch a scene and describe it in writing. Yes, do it for the very first scene on the very first show on the very first channel you turn to. Strive to write in in detail, in as colorful a manner as you can manage.
c. Step outside. Watch people interacting. Write about it. Describe the settings, introduce the characters and provide an account of what happened. Even two people randomly passing by each other can be fodder for several paragraphs of practice text.

Afterwards, you can take what you’ve written and practice revising them, using the good editing technique. Similarly, you can use your proofreading software to catch your mistakes, taking note of which areas of your writing needs further improvement.

Good writing always hinges on good editing skills.  If you can’t revise your drafts (with the help of a capable writing software) to make them clearer, tighter and more powerful, you’re leaving plenty of room for improvement.  The work you turn out is never nearly as good as it could be.

If you want to improve your ability to revise your own writing, then devote at least one day a week to practicing the skill.  Rather than halve the time by drafting and then waxing your revision process, turn to other people’s work.   Ask your writer friends if they have any drafts you can polish; stumble onto haphazardly-written blogs and work on them (without informing anyone – you’re throwing it away later anyway); open up a magazine and try to improve on the published pieces.

When your revise other people’s work in this manner, you adopt much more than the techniques that lead to good revisions.  Most of the time, you’ll end up finding the inner reactions that have lead to those techniques – that gnawing thought that something about what is written is plain intolerable.

Because you expose yourself to such things while being completely undetached, you end up acquiring a stronger critical mind – a crucial characteristic for being able to revise material well.  More than that, though, you develop a natural instinct that allows you to avoid many pitfalls during your drafting process, allowing your writing to become more mature.

Want to practice writing?  Then sit down and write.  That’s really all there is to it.

Of course, many of us will try to do that and end up staring blankly at our computer screens.  Some will  end up hitting Firefox and heading over to Facebook instead.  Me, I end up watching YouTube. For some reason, practice just never works out the way it’s supposed to.

That’s why you need writing exercises for practice the same way you need a proofreading software for your editing stages.  Here are a couple of my favorites:

Expanding non-descript words

Words that supposedly say something but really don’t are among my personal pet peeves.  Take terms like “nice,” “excellent” and “awesome,” for instance.  What the heck do they really mean?

To train yourself in eschewing these non-descript words in favor of more colorful descriptions, try to find a piece of your writing that uses them unsparingly.  Find all the phrases you’ve put together that suffer through it, such as “an awesome car,” “gorgeous weather” and “shoes are quite nice.”

Pick them out and rewrite them, this time detailing what the non-descript words refer to.  What’s so awesome about the car?  Why is the weather gorgeous?  How does a pair of shoes qualify as quite nice?

Creating Powerful Images

This next one is a neat trick to coming up with powerful writing imagery.  Draw two columns on a piece of paper.  On one side, write a list of twenty tangible nouns (e.g. river, house, machine); on the other, write twenty intangible (aka abstract) nouns (e.g. justice, progress, dreams).  Randomly take one word from each column and combine them in an “a..of” phrase, ending up with statements such as “a house of justice,” “a machine of progress” and “a river of dreams.”  Sure, some of them will sound lame, but you’ll also end up with some powerful imagery.

Some people think that the key to success in developing excellent writing skills is to fashion each piece diligently.  Tweak it, fix it and rework it till it’s perfect.  After all, that’s how you learn many things, from shooting a free throw to driving a car.

Strangely enough, that’s not the way it works with writing.  In fact, I’d venture so far as to suggest that working tirelessly for perfection is more likely to be detrimental to improving your abilities.  That’s because a perfectly-wrought piece, while ideal, is hardly attainable.  There will always be something you can change to make a piece of writing better.

Instead of going about things that way, a smarter alternative will be to leave things when they’re good enough. Does it read well?  Is the message clear?  Has the writing software run through it with no more errors?  Does it flow smoothly from one section to the next?  If it does, it might be time to close the book on the piece and start work on a new one.

Just write more.  Start a new piece from scratch, proof it and revise it till it’s good enough.  Then, do it all over again.  Creating more, instead of tweaking repeatedly, is what will truly speed up your skills development, especially when coupled with a set of competent writing tools.