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Blogging Pitfalls: How to Avoid Lazy Writing and Editing

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At the end of the day, the most basic activity a blogger must do is write.

While it is true that bloggers are, with good reason, expanding more and more into video and audio, at some point every blogger is going to have to write something. It might be a description, a bio or even just an advertisement but, at some point, a every blogger is going to have to put words onto paper.

But not every writer has the heart of a poet or the writing skills of a hard-hitting journalists. Bloggers come from all different backgrounds and styles and many have had little training or experience with writing prior to starting up their blog.

The good news is that you don’t need to be the next Shakespeare to be an effective and popular blogger, in many ways it helps not to be, but you do have to be able to write clearly and in a way that is engaging to your reader. It may not require a Ph.D in literature, but it does require that you work on honing your craft and make your writing as good as possible.

Failure to do so can sink an otherwise great blog and make your previous hard work a complete waste of time.

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3 Quick Tips for Improving Your Writing Skills

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One of the best ways to improve your writing, at least in terms of succinctness, is to write reviews. While I’ve been doing technical writing for a couple of decades and writing fiction, poetry and song lyrics for even longer, I cut my teeth on non-fiction by writing articles, interviews and reviews for weekly local and college papers in the 90s. The latter efforts, especially review writing, proved most beneficial to my blogging skills. If you’re looking for ways to improve your writing, I’d highly recommend writing reviews.

Here are some review writing tips:

  1. 150-250 words is a perfect review length. Start by reviewing something without a word limit. Then edit down, to 1000 words, 500 words, 250 words, etc. Write enough reviews and you’ll eventually find your writing to be more succinct — often a necessary skill for effective blogging. The shorter your review, the more effort it actually takes to write well.
  2. Learn to be your own editor. Copyediting seems to be a foreign concept in blogging, partly because of the crazy pace we bloggers sometimes have to maintain, no matter how well-intentioned we are. My own frequency of typos increased drastically when I started blogging. However, you still need to edit for meaning. Here’s a simple rule of thumb, to learn how to be succinct: When you’re editing down, cut out every other word, and if you lose the meaning, put some words back. I’ve forgotten the source of this advice, though I think it was from William Zinsser‘s classic On Writing Well book, but was a paraphrasing of a tip from an American novelist.
  3. Keep publication off the objectives list. If one of your review “exercises” is of high quality, you could spin it off into a blog post for publication, but that is not the objective. You’re writing these reviews to hone your skills. Think of them as analogous to the pencil sketches that an artist might do before a detailed illustration or painting. Leonardo da Vinci was a master painter because of the many thousands of sketches he did in his lifetime, which helped him understand structures and give his painter’s hand confidence. You can give your writer’s hand confidence in a similar manner.

Don’t stick to one type of review. When I published my monthly print magazine back in the early to mid-90s, I was reviewing everything out of necessity: music, movies, books, comics, restaurants. Those were pre-Web and Mobile Web days. Nowadays you can also review mobile apps, web games such as those that you find on Facebook, and Web-based services, websites, smartphones and much more. Some types of reviews are going to be harder to keep short, such as books and movies, but that’s fine. The objective is really to learn to be as succinct as possible, not to always write in the 150-250 word range.

What tricks have you employed to refine your writing skills? Feel free to share in the comments.

Image: Flickr.

How Long Does It Take to Proofread a Blog Post?

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Magnifying glassJustin recently wrote a post about proofreading tool After the Deadline. True enough, it makes sense to check your draft for misspellings, and mistakes in grammar and punctuation before hitting the publish button. If you’re using web markup, it also makes sense to check the draft for any unclosed or misplaced tags.

But aside from these simple mistakes, it takes more time to actually check a post if it does make sense. First, you have to check if your argument is reasonable. Then, you have to check if you got your facts straight. Then you need to check if your sources are valid, and if your post does point to the original (or at least the best quality) source of information. And there’s also a host of other things I’d like to check before hitting publish. Here would be a short checklist.

  • Check spelling.
  • Check grammar.
  • Check for clarity. I like using precise language. For instance, “hard” can mean many things. So I prefer to use “difficult.”
  • Check for conciseness. Usually, during proofreading I remove unnecessary sentences and even paragraphs.
  • Check for readability. I like to divide my posts into easily-digestible paragraphs. Better yet, I use headings, for easier scanning.
  • I do a logic check. Does my reasoning really make sense? Sometimes I rearrange paragraphs for better buildup.
  • Check categories and tags.
  • Check the site URL. With the many blogs I write on, I might be writing on the wrong site!
  • Preview the post to see how it looks like as a finished product.

I often find myself reading and rereading a draft before finally publishing. If it’s a feature post, proofreading often takes about 150% to 200% of the time I spent drafting the actual thing (or even longer). If it’s a news post, I’m more concerned with the timeliness of the article, so the time spent editing could be significantly shorter.

I think I may be too much of a perfectionist that sometimes i even scrap a draft if I think it won’t cut the grade in terms of quality and applicability to a blog. Sometimes I decide to move the draft to another site altogether, if my writing and editing results in straying away from the original intent or idea.

Either that, or perhaps I’m afraid of criticism.

My point here is that for me, I think readers deserve shorter, clearer blog posts that make an impact, rather than a post that just rambles and rambles and isn’t even clear on what the author wants to say. It’s more difficult to edit than write. But with more effort put into editing a post, it makes it easier for your readers to understand what you want to say, and this makes for better writing.

How long does it take for you to edit and proofread a blog post?

Image credit: flickr/data_op