The Art of Writing Well

What’s one thing that separates a riveting blog from a so-so one?

Good writing.

You can know everything about your topic and link to the best bloggers on the Web, but people won’t want to read your blog if they don’t understand what you’re saying.

So how do you write well?

The first thing to remember is writing is hard work. As I started this piece, I sat at a blank computer screen for about 10 minutes, biting my nails and trying to figure out how to begin. That’s normal. Whatever your topic, your writing needs to convey your passion about it, or it’s going to fall flat.

And passion takes effort.

As fabled sportswriter Red Smith once said, writing is easy; all you have to is “open a vein and bleed.”

The Art of Writing Well

Here are some tips to help you write well, culled from nearly 20 years writing and editing for daily newspapers:

• Be conversational: Don’t fall into the trap of the high-and-mighty tone. It’s a blog, not a dissertation. To get started, imagine what you would tell your best friend about the subject you’re writing about, and then write that. It will probably be quite compelling.
• Use active voice: That’s likely a term you haven’t heard since grade school. It simply means: The subject of the sentence should do the action, rather than receive it.

  Bill hit Tom is active voice. Tom was hit by Bill is passive voice. Active voice strengthens writing because it lets verbs provide the punch in the sentence.

• Use simple words: A blog isn’t a place to impress people with your million-dollar vocabulary unless you’re writing for an audience of linguists. Why use lackadaisical when lazy will do? Or taciturn when reserved or quiet works as well?
• Vary sentence structure, but keep most short: A sentence should have one main point. If you find yourself trying to say too much in one sentence, split it into two or even three sentences. Readers will find several short sentences easier to understand than one long one. But don’t start every sentence the same way. “I think …” “I think … ” time and again will get boring. Mix it up.
• Use powerful verbs: Verbs are the action in the sentence, so choose powerful ones, such as run, fight, coerce, dodge, carouse, when you can rather than weak verbs, such as be, am, is.
• Use adverbs and adjectives sparingly: Adverbs, such as lightly or heavily, change the meaning of verbs. Adjectives, such as red and beautiful, modify nouns. Adverbs and adjectives improve a sentence when they help paint a picture in the reader’s mind but should be avoided if they add little.

  For example, brown is a useless adjective when used with dirt, as in brown dirt, because generally dirt is brown. But red volcanic dirt conjures an image.

• Keep it short: Yes, the Web is limitless, but readers’ attention spans aren’t. People scan blogs, and a big chunk of text can scare them off.
• Read it aloud: Even though people likely won’t read your blog aloud, one of the best ways to see if your writing sounds good is to read it to yourself. That way you can hear if it makes sense. You can notice if a sentence is so long that you can’t say it without taking a breath. And your ear will pick up on whether the tone is conversational.
• Write more than one draft: Blogs are meant to be off-the-cuff ideas, but that doesn’t mean you need to press publish the second you’re finished typing. As Ernest Hemingway, one of the world’s best writers said, “The first draft of anything is shit.” Here’s Hemingway’s tips for good writing, courtesy of CopyBlogger.

  Blogging doesn’t need as many drafts as a novel might, but here’s what I suggest: Write a draft. Walk away from the computer and let it gel for at least a few minutes. Read it aloud. Revise. Read it again. Spell check. Preview it. (I tend to catch typos easier in Preview mode.) Publish.

• Just do it: The only way to get over writer’s block is to write and keep writing. As you write, you’ll get a sense of what works. As with anything else, the more you write, the better you get at it. And feel free to break any of these rules when it makes sense.

So get writing now.

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