Writing Tips

When you start a blog, you are officially a writer. You may not be a professional writer or someone who gets paid to write but, you are writing with the intent that someone will read it.

While you may be ar think you are an expert on your topic, you may not be a skilled writer. Most of us bloggers have had visions of our high school English teachers beating sentence structure into our heads as we blog. At the time you probably thought "when will I ever need to really know this?" Well, the time has come.

Here are some tips to help you write better.

• Don't worry about the punctuation, spelling etc at first. You should double check these as you edit, which is the last thing you should do before you publish.
• Invest in a grammer book. Used ones are fine and will offer help.
• Invest in spelling dictionary and thesaurus as well. Spell checks don't always pick up on everything.
• Write about something you know about. 
• Research what you don't know about but, want to write about. Use several different sources- not necessarily the ones that are open edited.
• Think about the structure of your post and each sentence. The introduction to your topic should be the first paragraph while the last paragraph should be the summation of your topic. Say something different in each sentence as well.
• Know your parts of speech;
  
  1. Noun- person, place or thing
  2. Verb- gives the active (subject is doing something) or passive(subject is receiving somthing)
  3. Adjective- modifies the noun or pronoun
  Knowing your parts of speech can help you better describe details.
• Know when to describe your details. This helps your reader envision and understand your topic. Good writers can always accurately tell a story that the reader can imagine being part of.
  
• Re-read and edit before you post. Make sure that you are not repeating your ideas or giving too many. Sometimes you can be better off writing more than one post if your post is too long.
• Readers like to read from an active voice. This gives excitement to the topic.
• Use illustrations and photos to help spark interest.
  

It will take time to develop your writing style. When you do, you will feel more comfortable writing and it will be easier for you to do. This is part of gaining a readership.