How long did it take you to write well

[protonp12]

Honestly, years. Reading helps alot too.

 

[scottypummill]

i think it also depend on natural talent

 

[Dopious]

I started writing in English in third grade, now I am 53, still can´t write a good article .. =)

Ps. Not english native, other than that I speak like the Swedish chef .. =)

 

[LetterTwenty7]

It is a constant learning process, but to answer your question - let's say it took me a few years before clients (webmasters) started saying they're quite impressed with the progress.

 

[Sudarshan Kar]

"Native English speaker quality" is a marketing gimmick and 99% of people who want to buy that "quality" don't even understand what it means. To most people native english speaker quality= good; Non-native= okayish to bad. And trust me, the 1% who actually know what native english quality means and the difference it makes are not the ones hanging around in forums, asking for discounts. They've already got whom they want and are banking from their investment.

 

[seojen]

My plan was to write articles, which are optimized for low comp long tail keywords. I thougth because long tail keywords are low competitive, articles, written by not good English, can bring traffic. But I think these articles would be have bad behavior factors. It is low comp long tails keywords maybe there is an exception for this situation; I don't know. Of course, such articles will be never be ranked by high competitive keywords. The plan was to write for only low comp keywords. Maybe after writing near 2 years, I could write more correctly. I would have 1000 long tail articles, which maybe would bring traffic. It is an ideal plan to learn to write and to earn a little money (maybe).

I'm thinking to do the same thing, what result did you get till now ??

 

[seojen]

It boggles my mind how many of my acquaintances born and raised here in the good ol' US of A with at least a high school education write word salad and pass it off as good 'nuff. Those of you who are not native who get discouraged because your writing skills may not hold a candle to some of us vets, rest assured that you are on hallowed ground and are likely in the top 25% of people who can comprehend English.

I started writing when I was extremely young.

Five year old Sherb would be scribbling stories down on blank sheets of printer paper while everyone else was coloring outside the lines.

Ten year old Sherb was spending rainy weekends holed up in his basement room, typing away on an old beige Windows 95 until my clothes smelled of pine and smoke from the wood stove.

Twelve year old Sherb was writing short stories about him and his friends going on incredible adventures together. I would take requests from buddies and classmates and turn their ideas into penned words.

Thirteen year old Sherb wrote a 200-page book about a group of college kids who stumble across a dead body on a walk at night and have to prove their innocence. This was written over the course of a month spent on campus in a summer program at a school that would eventually become my alma mater.

From there it progressed to:

• Winning weeklong trips in essay contests
• Becoming the state speech contest champion with a passionate speech about how Levi Strauss changed the world
• Raking in scholarship money and getting paid to go to college debt-free because of my propensity for the written word
• Moving my peers in a university creative writing course taught by author Ron Rash with a minute-by-minute accurate story from inside Chernobyl
• Writing a fake murder mystery blog that was the talk of my college for months, leaving behind real "clues" for people to follow
• Acing a communications class with an impassioned speech on how to adopt A Modest Proposal to modern day America to erase the national debt
• Continuing my writing passion into a half dozen partially-finished novels on varying topics
• Using my talents to score incredible job opportunities doing what I truly love to do and making knock-down bank doing so
• Hitting $100,000 in revenues writing for the fine people of Blackhatworld as of two weeks ago

Now I have been shifting focus to my own projects. I've got eight local projects in the works simultaneously that, once launched, will rock the area. My goal is to make it on the 40 under 40 list for my city of ~1 million people in the next few years. Only time will tell.

Writing opens up so many doors. If there is one skill I would recommend most to others, it is to master the written word. If anyone needs some pointers or tips, I'll be putting up a thread about it in the next few weeks. Keep an eye out. And keep writing and writing and writing. I know I've watched several members in this thread alone improve their skills immensely on a personal level.

Your English level is out of reach for an average guy like me, I better get off and start writing myself.

 

[marciosilletto]

it takes a lot of time, years i think
your results are getting better every single day

 

[blackbeans]

I got to admit. When I was in high school in California, I didn't really think of myself as a writer. Sure, I won a couple of writing contests, but I entered them on a whim. I didn't see myself as some sort of writer or novelist.

But when I went on to college and graduate school, it hit me like a ton of bricks. If you want to do well in any kind of humanities program, you have to learn how to write, and you have to know how to do it quickly.

How did I learn to write well? It started with writing quickly.

Most people know how to write. If English is your first language, you already know how to write. You know the syntax rules. You also know different idiomatic expressions. You have all the raw ingredients for well-written English texts.

The problem is, most of the time, people have emotional barriers to writing. They think it's too much of a hassle. They don't want to get bored. They can come up with a million and one reasons why they can't sit down and write stuff out.

But when I found myself in graduate school, I had to adapt or fail out. This is when I learned how to write quickly.

The key to excellent writing is to learn how to write quickly first and then fine-tune the quality later.

Once I got into the habit of cracking out at least 5,000 words per day, I then had space and the time to focus on quality.

Key Tips for Boosting Text Quality

Nobody's going to care about what you think about your work. Everybody is entitled to their opinion.

What matters is if you delivered on the unstated promises of your work.

Understand that every single piece of writing has some sort of promise. This can be boiled down to "I am not going to waste your time."

You have to deliver on that. And this is why you have to pick apart everything that you write based on value.

It doesn't matter what you feel or what you think your work is worth. At the end of the day, what is in it for the person reading it?

If you can get into that mindset, you will become an excellent writer.

Not only will you be technically proficient so your text is clean and it's free of grammatical errors, but it will also be engaging. It will also appeal to people on many different levels. I'm talking about psychological, emotional, mental, and experiential.

Please understand that the difference between well-written texts and mediocre stuff is the experience the reader gets.

Deliver on that experience and you will be able to get them to click on ads, fill out forms, or do whatever else that will add dollars to your bank account.

 

[clock]

I started writing in English in third grade, now I am 53, still can´t write a good article .. =)

Ps. Not english native, other than that I speak like the Swedish chef .. =)

Haha I am english and have been writing since whenever you start age 4? I still can’t write properly lol never did get where all those commas and things are supposed to go.

 

[crissdinesh]

I'm a non-native speaker who practices writing content for my blog. I do not outsource to get the content. Though it can take 4-5 hours for me to create meaningful content for a single blog post, I love to spend time on it without hesitation. As long as the content is precise and the readability is good, your article can look good.

Reading other blogs and news sites helps in learning.

 

[dabax]

Been copywriting for 7 years. Not as a dedicated copywriter but for my own businesses. You get better all the time.