Tag Archives: writing tips

How To Be A Prolific Writer

One of the weirdest things about blogging is that not everyone wants to leave comments. I’d love that as much as anything, but what sometimes happens is people will send an email to tell you things or to ask you questions. I take that as a compliment, especially since no one has sent me anything bad yet.

There’s one question I get more often than any other. The odd thing is that I get this same question outside of this blog. I get it on my other blog. I used to get it from my newsletters. I got it from people in organizations I used to belong to. And I always get it from some of my friends, because I tend to chronicle my life and then share my stories with all my friends, these days more often on Facebook.
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5 Writing And Blog Writing Tips With Explanations

I read a lot of blogs and I write a lot of posts. I’m certainly not perfect when it comes to the articles I write but most of the problems I see on other blogs or websites (especially news and information websites) are things that are easily avoidable… things I don’t tend to do myself.

Since I haven’t talked about writing issues in a long time, I thought it was time to offer some tips and critiques about writing, blog writing in particular, since this is an article on a blog.

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10 More Writing Tips, This Time In Three Minutes

Man, time moves fast. It was almost 2 years ago that I wrote my original post giving 10 Writing Tips In Two Minutes. Whereas I want to try to keep the other article in your mind, it also occurred to me that there are more tips that could help people that, though maybe not fitting within 2 minutes, will fit within 3 minutes. At least that’s all the time it would take me to read them. 🙂

With that said let’s get going.

her hands
Vyacheslav Bondaruk via Compfight

1. Create an outline. Sounds like work but it can really help you keep your focus on whatever you want to write about.

2. If you see a squiggly line underneath certain words, it either means you spelled it wrong or your spell check doesn’t recognize the word. Don’t ignore it; fix it.

3. Always keep a piece of paper or something else you can record on with you so if you have an idea to write about you can note it & come back to it later on.

4. If you have a favorite word you know you always use, after you’ve finished writing go back to see if you’re written it too many times, and if so eliminate some of them.

5. If your writing feels too formal you probably didn’t use any, or many, contractions. Use them; they make you feel real to your audience.

6. If you use large words make sure you’re using them properly. Using them makes you look smart to people who won’t look them up in a dictionary, but if your using them correctly then dabbling in the art of sesquipedalian can be a bit of fun. 🙂

7. Learn how to create paragraphs where the content is related so you’re not putting white space between sentences “just because”. People don’t want to read articles where every sentence is considered a paragraph any more than they want to read paragraphs that go on forever.

8. If you’re describing something, make sure you give enough without going too far. If you write “a guy with brown hair” that could be almost anyone. At the same time, Grisham once wrote 50 pages on how to build a car in the middle of a novel for a one line plot item two chapters later; way too much information.

9. Using things like smiley faces, lol, etc, help people know when you’re not being overly serious. It’s not always easy in short pieces like what shows up on blogs to convey your intent all the time.

10. When you’re done, if you’re not an experienced writer go back, read what you wrote, and verify that you got the proper point across. In an article I wrote for someone else once I wrote 3 words wrong and totally changed the meaning of the entire article. Trust me, it happens to all of us.

So, did it take you only 3 minutes? If it too longer no biggie as long as you got something out of it. Let me know if it helped, or if I need to explain anything further. Enjoy!
 

10 Writing Tips In 2 Minutes

Three weeks ago I wrote a quick post here giving 10 blog tips that could be read in 2 minutes or less. Seems that was the 3rd most popular post written in the last 30 days; figures right? I figured that I write about more than blogging around here, and that I’d take a shot and see if I could do the same type of thing regarding writing. Embrace your writing like the kid in the picture has. lol Anyway, let’s see if it can be done (of course it can be done):

1. When the mood hits you, write as much as you can. You can always edit, and you might end up with more than one post or article.

2. Watch your nouns and adverbs. Some are okay, but go overboard and you risk the power of your message.

3. Spell check is your friend; use it.

4. Punctuation is your other friend; don’t forget about semicolons.

5. If you believe you can’t think of anything to write think about your last 6 waking hours. There’s always a tale somewhere in there.

6. Write in your own voice. If you try to sound too smart or too perfect your message will come across very stale.

7. When you’ve finished writing, if you need to read it out loud to yourself; mistakes tend to stand out better that way.

8. Long posts are fine but don’t keep repeating the same message over and over. If you said it once, leave it be and move on.

9. Never forget to give attribution to your inspiration, otherwise someone might think you’ve plagiarized them.

10. Don’t over-think. Write the best way you know how, feel your words, and others will feel them as well.