Write.
There is so much emphasis these days on reading and how it will open up your life. And don’t get me wrong, it will. However, I think the best thing anybody can do for their careers is to write, and write well.
Looking back at the successes in my life, almost all of it had to do with writing. Awards and contests. Scholarships. Honors. Jobs. Promotions. In almost all of this, writing was involved. I’m not the greatest writer in the world… I can ramble, jump around, list things endlessly, and generally fail to end sentences, but the important thing is I’m comfortable writing and know how to convey a basic message. My advice to anyone who wants to get what they want out of life has always been to master writing as best you can.
Be a good speller; with spellcheckers integrated in everything, there’s no excuse for bad spelling.
Get good at grammar; understand capitalization and punctuation rules, and know where the apostrophe goes.
Be concise, but be complete. Don’t leave out details, but don’t go off on unimportant tangents.
Organize your thoughts. Have a main idea. Give supporting details. Structure your paragraphs so they make sense.
Bend the rules if you know what you’re doing. I break rules all the time if I think it will help my communication. Because sentence fragments.
Sound smart without sounding pretentious. There is nothing more amateurish than individuals who use recherché lexicon in order to impart an elementary communication of their mind. It makes you sound like an idiot.
Write poetry.
Life isn’t Twitter—write as much as you need to write, no more, no less.
A picture is worth a thousand words. Therefore, get a visual in your head and write what you see.
Start a blog. Own your thoughts and don’t be ashamed to make them public; just make sure to have the right ideas.
Before you open your mouth… research. Don’t let your uneducated opinions control your communications.
If you have writer’s block, you didn’t brainstorm properly. Organize your thoughts in Notepad and return to battle when you’ve got the map laid out.
Know when you’ve written enough, and shut up.