I come across many people who tell me they don’t know how to write. I point out to many of them that they got through school, some of them through college, and I know they had to do a lot of writing then because I had to do a lot of writing. Many people don’t see that as the same thing; oh really?
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In school, you had to write to get grades good enough to pass. In business, you have to write well enough to try to get more customers. It may not be a blog post. It might be a short ad or a long ad. It might be a radio commercial. It might even be a flyer that you put on the wall of your own establishment. Everyone knows how to write something, and had to write something in the past; it’s inevitable.
What’s happened is that not everyone knows how to write well. Not as many people seem to pay attention to either spelling or grammar. I see errors of omission on a consistent basis and it’s shocking. If this was someone writing a letter to their friend, then there’s no problem. But is this the type of thing you want your customers to see? I think not.
There are basically two things that can be done to help correct writing issues. One is to hire someone else to do your writing for you. The other is to pay more attention to what’s being written.
For instance, with today’s computers and programs, almost everyone gets notified when a word has been misspelled by some kind of squiggly line. All one has to do is right-click on the word and see what choices are being given for correction.
When it comes to grammar, Microsoft Word has a couple of settings to help check for grammar, but the recommendations sometimes seem a bit stiff. Instead, what I find useful here and there is to read what I’ve written out loud; your ears will almost always hear something that doesn’t sound right.
I know I said 2 things but I’m going to add a third thing; giving more unexpected value! 🙂
The third thing is knowing what you’re writing about. For instance, there are tons of “make money blogging” blogs online but few of them actually make much money. To me, those people have no idea what they’re talking about. If they only talked about what they’ve tried and what didn’t work, like I did when I did my 6-part series some years ago about all the affiliate programs I was on, I’d give them more credence.
If you know your topic and can write about it, then you’re probably going to be pretty good, grammar and spelling notwithstanding. If you know how to tell a story you’ll be fabulous.
Sometimes all it takes is a little bit of time to get things right. Everyone doesn’t have to write like a pro; all anyone really asks for is that you write to be understood. If you’re in business, you have to remember that your words represent your competence in someone else’s eyes. If not, then do your best and your readers will feel it.
Speaking from experience, I hesitated beginning a blog because of a number of factors:
* Making a commitment to write on a consistent basis.
* Not knowing what I was going to write about each week.
* Wondering, who will want to read my stuff?
Thanks again Mitch for giving me the nudge I needed to begin this incredibly journey. I’ve grown from the experience.
Glad to do it Steve. I think you’ve grown greatly and it seems people like what you have to say as well.
And two golden rules, don’t use autocorrect and predictive texting.
Ah, those are phone rules, and I’ve violated them a few times. Luckily, since I refuse to comment on blogs via the phone I’ve been pretty good on that front. lol
Hey Mitch,
When I first saw the heading I thought to myself, nope, I don’t consider myself a writer. But then that’s in the professional sense. I don’t think I’m good enough to write a novel for example.
In a blogging sense I reckon I’m a pretty good writer. I know there are times when I make some obvious errors but that’s only because I rush the posts through and don’t take the time to proof read them. Luckily I can rely on you to cheerfully point those errors out to me 😉
That’s what I’m ultimately here for. 🙂 You’ve constructed some very good blog posts over the years, and your sponsored posts are good enough to get you paid. So you must be doing something right.
Great post Mitch..
Writing skill is very important for every bloggers. But the people who’s first language isn’t English are struggling a bit and sadly I’m one of them.. 🙂
We do lots of grammatical mistakes and I’m sure that even this comment may have some grammatical mistakes 🙂
Thyrone, considering that I only know one language, it’s impressive that you can do as well as you can. 🙂 Still, let me ask how good of a writer do you think you are in your language?
Mitch, thank you for the post. I especially love a third thing about unexpected value – when readers visit your blog, they are usually lokking for an expert opinion or some extra helpful tips.
Thanks Chad. No one ever expects the extra value but they always appreciate it.
hi
Everyone have there own choice. Users picked the topic that they love to read. We just have to post each and everything in our blog. Because we don’t know exactly what they want and what is in there mind. We have to keep our blog very familiar for our users. So that they can easily grab the things that we have post for our readers. If they like our way of post than they will surely recommend our blog to there friends.
thank u
Well, at least we hope it works that way. I think if one writes well and doesn’t forget to promote their posts that they’ll get readers; the more the merrier.
I read when I can and I have a friend who in an author of several books. I was reading one of his recently and there are a bunch of errors. Omitted question marks. A word used twice in a row when not needed. (His dog jumped over the the fence.) I would think tools would catch this. I asked if he used a proofreader. That person should have caught it too!
What’s funny is that you had an error in your comment Troy. lol In any case you’re right, if it’s a book there’s really little excuse for errors since most of us write our books in something like Word. Well, there are some words spelled correctly but turn out to be the wrong word, and those can be missed here and there, especially when they’re small words. Still, those are rare when compared to the number of spelling mistakes we see.
Yet, in general I don’t think that’s really the measure of writers. Creativity is probably more important initially… editing is important after the fact.
Hahaha. Good eye Mitch.
Yes, if the ideas and the way they are communicated are crap and no one is reading it anyway, spelling and missing quiestion marks don’t really mater I guess.
thanks Mitch. Good stuff!