In the first two installments of this series, we talked about how to choose a premise for your blog, and in the second I gave a brief primer on different blogging platforms. Assuming then that you’ve chosen a topic and have a platform to write on, you’re probably eager to start clacking away, churning out blog posts with all the enthusiasm of any new hobbyist.
Which is good! That is the first step to writing (and blogging) well: actually writing in the first place. But you don’t want to stop there; you want to make your writing the best that it can be. After all, you could have the slickest looking blog out there, with an engaging perennial topic that will allow you to continually find new and interesting subjects to write about, but if you write poorly readers will not be engaged and your blog will only receive a fraction of the views it might have otherwise had.
Now, I am far from the best writer out there; believe me, I’m well aware of my own flaws and bad habits. The giant sentence in the previous paragraph is one example. My habit of using parenthesis (for emphasis!) is another. These things are fine in moderation, but taking them too far is another thing entirely. As a blogger who presumably enjoys what they’re writing about and wants others to enjoy reading about it, you want to become aware of your bad habits and to do as much as you can to correct them.
But a lot of that comes with experience. If you haven’t done much writing, in school or otherwise, you need to learn the basics of grammar, punctuation, spelling, and sentence structure before you can begin to find your bad habits. You can find basic guides online that will move you a long way toward improving your writing. I won’t go into an exhaustive list of different mistakes you might come across in this post, but perhaps in the future I’ll point out mistakes I see often in my online wanderings.
One of the best ways to learn to write is to read. Read a variety of things, both different genres and different mediums. Read the newspaper. Read other blogs. Read articles by big news sites. Read books from the 19th century. Read modern books. Read books from different genres. See how different people write in different circumstances, and see what appeals to you and what doesn’t about those writing styles. You’ll learn a lot about the basics simply by reading and then becoming aware of how your own writing mimics (or doesn’t) other authors.
You will start to become aware of how to structure sentences and how to present subjects in a clear, concise way, which is definitely what you want when blogging. Be careful though, because you might pick up some bad habits along the way. For example, my wordy and over long sentences stem from having read many works by H.P. Lovecraft, who was infamous for his dense prose. While I liked his style, these days it isn’t as favored as the more concise, direct style you see in novels and especially online.
Another key to getting better at writing is to allow yourself to suck. Looking for bad habits is one thing, but it’s another thing to nitpick yourself to the point that writing isn’t fun. You have to allow yourself to write crap, because that’s how you get better. Writing anything, even if it is the most incoherent, poorly structured, hardly readable hunk of garbage you’ve ever had the misfortune of laying your eyes upon (*cough* like some of the stories sitting on my hard drive *cough*) is better than writing nothing at all. A blogger who doesn’t write any posts isn’t a blogger, just like a novelist who does nothing but plot, plan, and outline but never actually writes the damned novel isn’t a novelist.
So write, but don’t rush to post. Write, and hold in the urges to edit as you go, then release them once the post is done. Be ruthless. If it doesn’t need to be there, cut it. If it sounds off and you don’t know how to reword it? Cut it, you probably don’t need it. Look for typos, awkward sentences, and misused words. Built in spelling and grammar check features help, but knowing what to look for yourself–and when to break the rules–is critical.
A guide to good writing is far beyond this little blog post. My goal here was to get you thinking about how you could improve your writing to make your blog the best it can be. You don’t have to be the next Ernest Hemingway to have a great blog; all you need to do is learn the basics, and write to the best of your ability. It takes humility–you might find that you’re making a lot of mistakes. That’s ok. You might go back to your older posts five years from now and cringe. That’s ok too! That means you’re getting better–in fact, if your writing style hasn’t changed at all in five years, there’s probably a problem.
In the next installment of this guide, I will talk about how to source your blog posts. We will go into primary and secondary sources, and where to find the best sources. Not only that, we’ll talk about how to evaluate sources, and tips on citations. Stay tuned!
