The best thing about this is that it doesn’t restrict you to anything, it is easy to start and to keep doing on a daily basis. It doesn’t matter how much you do, as long as you do it regularly. You can start small and write about whatever you like – whether reflecting on what happened during the day, or inventing something different from reality if you find reality not too interesting. You can talk to an imaginary person in your diary, or write down what you would have changed (if you could) about things you have encountered today, what you would do differently if you were in someone else’s shoes. Blogging Also consider blogging instead of, or in addition to writing just for yourself. It is highly recommended both by skilled writers and those who were once very uncomfortable with writing because they haven’t done it enough, or were often stuck in a rut when starting to write something. Blogging is convenient, fun and effective because you can get a free account, it helps you to write regularly, view things from a different perspective when you have an audience, and also receive feedback in comments. Writing for an audience has a lot in common with speaking to an audience, but it is easier and less scary. Blogging lets you become comfortable with both, thus helping you acquire another essential skill over time that is very useful, as you will definitely have to speak to a certain audience at some point. Understanding your audience, even if it’s very small, is important for becoming more persuasive and powerful in your writing and speech as well. Avoiding Plagiarism Not many consider themselves good at writing, but nearly everybody thinks they’re good at paraphrasing, right? Well, not exactly right, as many written assignments show. Changing some words around or taking a few thoughts of others to be glued together by your own words is not effective paraphrasing, but actually primitive and most common “lazy” student plagiarism. You may get away with it, but it is not an acceptable writing style – to be precise, it’s just not acceptable and may even get you into serious trouble. A piece of writing that almost entirely consists of different citations shows a poor writing style, even though it may not be considered plagiarism. Last but not least, a large share of plagiarism occurring today is accidental, without students or writers actually meaning to plagiarize – this happens simply due to similarity of someone’s thoughts to something already expressed or discussed before. Anyway, it’s better to check and be safe than sorry – with online plagiarism checkers are available nowadays, you can get a fairly good idea of which parts of your work appear to be unoriginal, need proper citations, as well as how much (or how little) of your written assignment are your own thoughts and ideas. Knowing Your Requirements Being able to tell a good story is great and very helpful, but it doesn’t make one a good writer when the requirements are quite different from just convincing your reader to adopt an idea