If you want to get better as a writer, you need thick skin. You need to be able to listen to criticism and not take it personally. Writing is a skill that can continually be improved. Even the best writers can get better.

For one thing, grammar rules are complicated. You may know them and be concentrating so hard on your thoughts that you mess up. Maybe there are a few you don’t know as well as you thought.

Even if your grammar is 100 percent correct, the sentence may be clunky or it may not convey what you thought you were saying.

If you want to get better, you have to be willing to listen to others telling you what they think you’ve done wrong. Sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they tell you in a way that’s easy to hear and sometimes they don’t. They may even come across as harsh or self-righteous. Let go of the emotion and learn what you can.

One very effective, albeit frightening, way to improve is to ask someone you trust to edit a piece you’ve written in track changes and to make comments about why they’ve made changes. Instead of just reviewing those changes, go through and revise your original based on them. It’s more time consuming, but it’s the difference between reading a map and using the GPS. Either way, you end up in the same place, but in following a map you are more likely to learn the route. The comments will help you to discover if it’s an issue of not knowing a rule or simply having been distracted. They may reveal if there are things you often do wrong. They will also help you to decide if you want to accept the change or not. In some case, even when it comes to grammar, it’s a matter of judgment rather than strict rule.

In going through this exercise myself recently, I learned that publically can also be spelled publicly, which is the more accepted form of the word. I also learned that the first letter after a colon is not always capitalized. It’s upper case when what comes next is a full sentence and lower case when it’s a list.