100 Ways to Improve Your Writing (Updated): Proven Professional Techniques for Writing with Style and Power

The best-known one is Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary by Wilfred Funk and Norman Lewis. Read that book or one like it.

People is the one subject that everybody cares about.

A lead should be provocative. It should have energy, excitement, an implicit promise that something is going to happen or that some interesting information will be revealed. It should create curiosity, get the reader asking questions.

take a few deep breaths, put your pulse rate into second gear, and deliver a supply of oxygen to the brain.

write in your head. Clear up the inconsistencies while you’re brushing your teeth. Get your thoughts organized while you’re driving to work. Think of a slant during lunch. And most important, come up with a beginning, a lead, so that you won’t end up staring at your keyboard as if it had just arrived from another galaxy. If you have spent time writ

Writing should be conversational. That does not mean that your writing should be an exact duplicate of speech; it should not. Your writing should convey to the reader a sense of conversation.

Do not write until you know why you are writing. What are your goals? Are you trying to make readers laugh? Are you trying to persuade them to buy a product? Are you trying to advise them? To prove an argument? To inform them so that they can make a decision?

Strive instead to write well and without self-consciousness.

So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences.