Good writing style is hard to define yet we readily recognize it when we come across a well written text. Such text is easy to read: eyes glide through the words without interruption while the mind effortlessly captures ideas and transforms them into vivid images, sounds, and feelings. Well written text is also engaging — it pulls a reader into its action and does not let go.
While good writing style is hard to master, there are several simple yet powerful techniques which many writing guides and coaches focus on. They can quickly improve the quality of your texts. Expresso teaches these techniques by applying them directly to your writing.
Expresso highlights weak parts of a text which can benefit from stylistic changes, making editing simpler and more enjoyable. With practice, it will help you develop an eye for awkward phrasing and find possible fixes.
Have you ever come across a great written piece and wondered what made it so good and how you could mimic the author’s style? Put it into Expresso and discover which metrics significantly differ from your own writing.
Use Expresso to monitor changes in your writing style over time. When learning a new skill, fast and concrete feedback is crucial. Learning to write better is no exception to this rule; however, measuring improvement in writing is traditionally hard. Expresso metrics can provide such feedback. Automatically.
Writing metrics employed by Expresso can be powerful but they are not a “magic bullet”. They highly correlate with good writing but are not the cause of it, just like umbrellas correlate with rain but, of course, don’t trigger it. Therefore, there is no benefit in optimizing the metrics blindly. For example, constructing short nonsensical sentences out of several common short words — “it”, “get”, “all”, etc — will result in a low readability grade; however, the text will be unintelligible. Instead, use highlighted metrics to identify weak areas and to get ideas for possible edits.
Good writing style remains an art, not a science…