6 Ways to Identify Your Writing Weaknesses
You know the saying, you can’t fix something if you don’t know what’s broken? Is that a saying … I swear it is, but maybe it’s not. I know my weakness is fact-checking. Ha!
But the point is, in order to fix something, you have to know what’s wrong. You may know your weaknesses in a broad sense: I’m bad at dialogue, or I can’t seem to organize my ideas clearly. But get specific on what your weaknesses are; the more specific you are, the better chance you have of spotting them and fixing them during your self-editing.
1. Know Writing Craft
Read blogs, books, and social media posts; listen to podcasts; attend writing groups. As you do so, you’ll learn what makes for good writing in your genre. With each new craft tool you learn, assess whether you do it well or not.
In my Self-Editing Essentials for Fiction book, I cover 29 craft topics, and in the nonfiction version, I cover 21. These are not a complete list, especially in the technical section dealing with grammar and punctuation. But it’s a good starting point.
2. Mine your feedback history
If you’ve ever shared your writing with beta readers, critique partners, an editor, or a writing group, you have data.
Go back through every note you’ve received across multiple projects and look for commonalities.
For example, fiction writers might find that multiple readers have flagged the midpoint dragging before the act two turn, or that the villain’s motivation doesn’t hold up, or that the romantic tension resolves too quickly.
Nonfiction writers might notice that readers consistently say the main point is hard to find, or that the case studies feel surface-level, or that opening chapters lose them before the good content starts.
If you haven’t shared your work widely enough to have this kind of feedback history, that’s worth noting too—outside readers are one of the most reliable diagnostic tools available to any writer.
In writing my books, I had one beta team member point out that I use “you” when it’s implied. For example, After you finish X, you can do Y could become After you finish X, do Y. Now that might seem minor, but dropping the implied you does strengthen my writing. It’s more concise and feels stronger.
Once he pointed that out, I see that in every piece I write: social media posts, blogs, newsletters. It wasn’t on my radar before, but now I try to edit it out (I edited it out of four sentences in this blog).
3. Run your manuscript through a writing analysis tool
Several tools can scan your manuscript and surface patterns for you.
ProWritingAid is the most versatile option for both fiction and nonfiction writers. It runs 25+ reports covering style, readability, grammar, and consistency—including overused words, clichés, and sentence variety and rhythm. It integrates with Word, Google Docs, and Scrivener, so it fits wherever you already write.
AutoCrit is built with fiction writers in mind, though it handles nonfiction as well. It flags overused words, repeated words, redundancies, and clichés, and highlights patterns like passive voice and places where phrasing starts to lose impact. It also checks dialogue for natural flow, tone consistency, filler phrases, and repeated tags and compares dialogue style across scenes, helping you spot when your characters start sounding the same.
What makes these tools genuinely useful for pattern-finding is that they work across your whole manuscript at once. A word or construction you’ve used 60 times reads fine in any individual sentence. Seeing it flagged 60 times in a single report makes the habit impossible to ignore.
As with any tool, they have their limits, so use your human judgment. To be very clear, I’m advertising their use for finding your overused word choices, patterns, etc., not for any other use case, though they have other uses, but that’s for another topic.
4. Read your work against published books in your genre
Pull two or three books in your genre that are similar to your book’s purpose and goals and have been well received. Read a chapter of one, then a chapter of yours. Do this several times across different sections.
This comparison works because it removes you from the vacuum of your own manuscript. Now you’re not asking “is this good?” in the abstract; instead, you’re seeing concrete differences between your choices and the choices of writers whose work is landing with readers.
You’re not looking to imitate just to identify places where the gap between their work and yours is consistent enough to point to a weakness in your writing style and approach.
5. Ask readers the right questions
Many writers ask readers, “What did you think?” and get feedback that’s either too vague to act on or too focused on personal preference to reveal actual weaknesses. The fix is to ask more specific questions before your reader ever opens the manuscript or the portion of writing you’re sharing with them.
Ask fiction readers to
- flag any moment they felt bored, confused, or emotionally disconnected
- tell you the moment they felt most invested and the moment they almost put it down
- describe your main character in three words without looking back at the text
Ask nonfiction readers to
- summarize the main argument of each chapter in one sentence after finishing it
- flag any place they felt the logic didn’t hold or they needed more evidence
- say where they skimmed
Specific questions produce specific answers. Those answers, mapped across multiple readers, show you exactly where your writing is losing people, and that’s where your weaknesses live.
Revisit those flagged spots and note any similarities in the writing approach and style in those passages.
6. Look at your first drafts alongside your revisions
If you save your drafts (and you should), comparing an early draft to a later one reveals what your instincts produce before your craft kicks in. Those first-draft instincts are where your deepest habits live.
Note what you’re fixing and improving often during your revision stage. Did you add in several transitions (nonfiction), did you insert more interiority (fiction)?
What to do with this information?
Create a personalized self-editing checklist. Yes, this is for the self-editing phase. Sure, as you become aware of your weaknesses, they may crop up less often in your drafting naturally.
But don’t focus on and worry about them during drafting. If you’re noticing your weaknesses during drafting and stopping and fixing them, this can lead to stronger imposter syndrome or frustration.
So the point of knowing your weaknesses is to create a list of what to look for when revising another piece of writing or further revising your current one.
This list may change over time, as you add new weaknesses you spot and remove ones you no longer struggle with.
But with a list, your self-editing will be more focused, and thus, your published writing will be stronger.
