Think of the billions of dollars companies spend each year producing written material to promote, explain, and expand their business.
These include advertising materials, reports, proposals, manuals, memos, plans and many other things.
While some are the province of special departments in larger corporations, small businesses often do much of this work themselves, and employees who can write well are very valuable.
As writing skills plummet across the country, businesses are investing thousands of dollars in paying freelancers and training their employees so if you can write clear and effective prose you will stand out from the crowd and find more opportunities at work and more interest in your applications if you are job-hunting.
"Yet", you say, "I can barely pay my bills.
How can I possibly afford a writing course, or even buy a book on the subject?" Well, it doesn't take thousands of dollars and an expensive course to improve your writing, there are things you can do without any resources at all and many books available online or at your library which can help.
History is full of stories of people of limited formal education who became great writers, from the escaped slave, Frederick Douglass who taught himself to read surreptitiously, to the semi-orphaned Ralph Moody whose schooling was interrupted by his need to support his family, and even Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, whose skills were honed through practice and observation.
Each of these has their own individual style which reflects their unique personality, and you, too, can develop yours.
The first step is actually to start writing.
It can be daunting to face that blank page so practice putting your words on paper (or on your computer screen) and do not worry about quality.
There are lots of things you can write about - your thoughts, your reading, your dreams for the future, people around you.
Once you are doing this, you can start to work on basic skills like sentence construction, adding variety to your choice of words, or taking out filler words such as 'like' and 'actually'.
An excellent way to evaluate your writing is to read it aloud - or have someone else read it to you so that you can hear it with different ears - and identify one thing at a time to work on.
A common problem is overuse of the verb 'to be' and its various forms (am, are, is, was, were, being, be, etc.
) which can make your writing dull and lifeless.
An easy exercise to see if you have this problem is to write a paragraph without using 'to be' at all.
As you write more you will become more observant of the style in your own reading and you can set yourself to identify and imitate the particular characteristics of various authors.
The more you do this, the more lively and masterful your own writing will become and you will develop your own voice through observing others.
Your writing skill will be yet another asset that sets you apart from the crowd.