Over at the Dumb Little Man website they have a list of “50 Tools that can Improve your Writing Skills” which, as I glanced over them, looked to be helpful for those of us who want to polish our writing. In addition to the tips or tools, some of the ones I looked at included simple exercises to reinforce the advice.

Here are the 50 tips (without the links; you’ll need to go to the actual site for those) for your perusal. This makes a good one-year plan if you learn one tip per week and even allows you a 2 week “vacation.”

1: Branch to the Right
2: Use Strong Verbs
3: Beware of Adverbs
4: Period As a Stop Sign
5: Observe Word Territory
6: Play with Words
7: Dig for the Concrete and Specific
8: Seek Original Images
9: Prefer Simple to Technical
10: Recognize Your Story’s Roots
11 Back Off or Show Off
12: Control the Pace
13: Show and Tell
14: Interesting Names
15: Reveal Character Traits
16: Odd and Interesting Things
17: The Number of Elements
18: Internal Cliffhangers
19: Tune Your Voice
20: Narrative Opportunities
21: Quotes and Dialogue
22: Get Ready
23: Place Gold Coins Along the Path
24: Name the Big Parts
25: Repeat
26: Fear Not the Long Sentence
27: Riffing for Originality
28: Writing Cinematically
29: Report for Scenes
30: Write Endings to Lock the Box
31: Parallel Lines
32: Let It Flow
33: Rehearsal
34: Cut Big, Then Small
35: Use Punctuation
36: Write A Mission Statement for Your Story
37: Long Projects
38: Polish Your Jewels
39: The Voice of Verbs
40: The Broken Line
41: X-Ray Reading
42: Paragraphs
43: Self-criticism
44: Save String
45: Foreshadow
46: Storytellers, Start Your Engines
47: Collaboration
48: Create An Editing Support Group
49: Learn from Criticism
50: The Writing Process

Dumb Little Man – Tips For Life is a site that offers tips, advices and tools that can “…save you money, increase your productivity, or simply keep you sane.”