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.

Your post outline

When planning out your post, stick to an outline mentality and fill in the blanks. Each paragraph should express a different idea that is unique to that paragraph. Following the outline mentality will make your blog as a whole look more consistent and will give you a writing style.

Your outline should look something like this.
(It's basically a review of basic writing 101)


I Introductory Paragraph
1. Introduce the reader to your post topic.
2. Give a supporting reason why they should read on.
3. End with a teaser on what is to come.

II Body.
1. Subtopic
2. Subtopic
3. Subtopic

The number of paragraphs in your body depends on the amount of information you have on the whole post topic.

III Conclusion
1. Summarize what your post was about
2. Inform the reader on how they can get more information.
3. Site your sources.

Follow this outline idea to some extent for awhile and it will soon come naturally.You will develop a writing style that will become recognizable to your readers.

What are you posting?

Are you posting to post or are you posting to provide information?

When you post just to post, it is obvious to your readers. Your post will have little content, will tell not much about you or what you are thinking, and the result will leave the reader asking why they wasted the last 5 minutes of their life reading it.

When you post to share information, the reader re-reads the important stuff and gets inspired. You information is new to the reader and the reader finds it interesting. The reader recommends and/returns to your site.

Here are 10 tips to having inspiring content.

1. Be aware of possible content during your daily life.
2. Carry a note pad and jot down content as it comes to you throughout the day.
3. Talk to your reader as if they are a friend that you know. However, keep your wording professional.
4. Make your content appear new or refreshed . You can do this through wording it in a fresh way.
5. Make your post visually appealing. Add images, write in blocks of words and bold important items.
6. Use proper English and spell it correctly. You can write your post in a text editing program and copy and paste the result to your blog.
7. Be consistent with your font, it's size and color. Then when you need to emphasize something via font presentation, your reader will know it.
8. Put yourself in your reader's point of view. Does your blog look interesting to you as a whole?
9. Learn how to edit material . You can cut out useless sentences/words and keep it more readable.
10. Make every sentence say something new.