Are you excited about your writing? Do you write daily? Do you feel as though your ideas are clearly written and understood by your readers?

In her presentation on avoiding writing pitfalls, Micki Caskey stressed the importance of building a lively writing practice and shared three critical parts for doing so.

1) Intention

By communicating your ideas clearly and logically, you make your thinking visible to the reader.

A clear intention outlined through objectives, document structure, headings, etc. can ensure that your reader understands the purpose of the writing and can interpret them correctly.

2) Perspective

By selecting a style guide, you add consistency to your writing that is familiar to the reader in your discipline.

Regardless of the style used (APA, Chicago, MLA, etc.), selecting and following the one that’s prevalent in your discipline or required by the target publisher, will help your reader focus on your ideas rather than your format.

3) Expectation

By ensuring that your writing is purposeful and useful, you add value to your readers.

For your writing to be effective, your reader must find value in the work. Ensure that the purpose of the document is clear, and the content is useful to your reader.

Maintaining focus on these three parts – intention, perspective, and expectation – helps to keep the reader’s goals at the forefront of your daily writing practice, establishes a guide for the writing process, and results in a livelier writing practice.

This content was adapted from the 2021 Textbook & Academic Authoring Virtual Conference session, “Pitfalls to Avoid: Unloading the Dead Weight in Your Academic Writing”.

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Eric Schmieder is the Membership Marketing Manager for TAA. He has taught computer technology concepts to curriculum, continuing education, and corporate training students since 2001. A lifelong learner, teacher, and textbook author, Eric seeks to use technology in ways that improve results in his daily processes and in the lives of those he serves. His latest textbook, Web, Database, and Programming: A foundational approach to data-driven application development using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, MySQL, and PHP, First Edition, is available now through Sentia Publishing.