The ease of publishing our own blogs, websites,
and social media posts have encouraged many poets and writers to get their work
out there for the general public and/or specialized groups to see. While this
provides a welcomed outlet for self-expression, feedback from readers, promotion
of a cause or mission, and the incentive to keep writing, it’s also resulted in
unsubstantiated “facts,” opinions best kept to ourselves, and some really
sloppy writing!
If that smushed your toes, I’m sorry about
that, but I truly hope you’ll show your work respect by checking info, using
good grammar, and learning to say what you want to say in a concise and winsome
manner that shows an awareness of your readers. These tips for poets might help
writers in all genres:
- Write as you always have. Then put the work aside
and go onto another poem or project.
- When you’re pretty much forgotten what you said
and how you said it, go back and read your work aloud, paying particular
attention to the sounds and sense of what you’re saying.
- Pretend someone else wrote those lines! Then
read them again.
- If anything causes you to stumble, take that as
a clue to self-edit.
- Read the poem aloud again to hear if you repeat
what you’ve said. If so, pick the best phrase or line.
- For poems longer than a dozen lines, get
radical! Cut unnecessary words. Tighten the lines. Poems that go on and on
usually lose their impact – and your readers!
- As you revise your work, use a light touch and
save the heavy rhymes for humor. Too many rhymes jammed into a poem or
repeating the same sound again and again get monotonous. Worse, such rhymes
typically twist a sentence into something that makes little sense. To be blunt,
they’re a way of showing off!
- Sometimes it helps to wean yourself from rhymes
or any other technique you frequently use and write something totally
different. For instance, if you’ve been writing long poems, try writing haiku
or other traditional form that confines your work to a particular length.
- Read poems by other people – lots of poems! An
anthology is a good place to find your soon-to-be favorite poets.
- Strive for excellence, and keep on writing!
©2025, Mary Harwell Sayler
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