Writing is a science and an art that needs to be toned and honed and be free of common mistakes. This is important, especially if you want the writing competition judges to pick your story as the winner. You need to improve your writing by knowing the writing mistakes that many writers always commit. You should also know the best way of correcting them before entering your submission into a writing contest.
Writing Styles
Once your select the writing style you will use in opening lines, you need to be consistent throughout the story or the entire book. You should avoid using too many run-on sentences on your writing work. You can always divide the long sentences into two sentences. You should also avoid repetitive use of words in your story and edit out repetitive words before writing contests judges sees them. To cut down on frequently used words, the best thing to do is read out your entry story out loud. You should also be consistent in the use of tenses and verbs. It is best to stick to the present tense or past tense for the entire story to avoid confusion.
Use of Homophones
When submitting entries for competitions, most writers have challenges dealing with homophones. Therefore, you need to be wary of words that sound the same but have different spellings, for example, effect and affect or their and there. Counterchanging these words will change the overall meaning of the whole paragraph in your story. Furthermore, this will send a warning sign to the judges in writing competitions that you are not professional enough to countercheck for these types of grammatical errors before you submit your work.
Grammatical Errors
When preparing your work for writing contests, you must ensure that there are no grammatical errors. You should use commas after a phrase, lengthy sentence, or clause to elaborate where it ends to ensure clarity. In compound sentences that join two independent clauses, using commas help to indicate a pause between these two adjoining sentences. Your paragraphs will be much easier to read and less complicated to understand if you use commas correctly.
Spelling Mistakes
There is nothing as bad as submitting a writing piece that is full of spelling mistakes. Before you submit your work for writing competitions, you must read through several times to ensure it is free from spelling mistakes. There are also free and paid software that you can use to identify any spelling mistakes that need to be corrected especially, compound words, proper pronouns, and homonyms. Do not let your work appear substandard to the judges because it is full of spelling mistakes.
Writing contests are essential for every writer that wants to acquire new skills, network with other writers, or grow their career. Therefore, you must ensure that every piece you submit is perfect and free of errors. Hopefully, these tips will help you enhance your writing submissions for writing competitions.
