Any thing, any topic, simple or complex all depends on how it is writte. That is my experience, maybe I’m wrong..but the most important thing I learned in relation to writing on any topic is simply……show don’t tell.

People with a desire to write should put themselves in a position where they have to write every day. Blogs are great for that. No writer is excited about writing every time he sits at the keyboard; in fact, most professional writers do not enjoy writing. A daily post to a blog is an enforced discipline that will work wonders for anyone’s skills.

Glad to see you included grammar. Knowing how the language works is powerful stuff.

I write a blog on writing for blogs and will link this up right away.

If you want to be a good writer, there’s only two things you have to do:

1) Write a lot!
2) Read a lot!

The second one is just as important as the first. If you want to write, you must read. There’s no way around it. I can’t tell you how many people I have met who want to be writers, and even call themselves writers, but shun reading. This is like wanting to be a chef but hating to eat.

Improving my writing skils has already helped me alot!!! Thanks for the article.

Beijinho (Kiss)

But whatever you do,
I beg and plead,

PUT A SPACE BETWEEN ‘ALOT’.”

-Me, just now.

Carol

Fortunately, I have a number of readers that will politely (or not so politely) point out my speling mistaks.

I once read an e-book about blogging that claimed that the casual nature of blogs made grammar less critical than other forms of writing. It then proceeded to disprove its own thesis with incomplete sentences, sentences that made no sense, and a writing style that was reminiscent of an English translation of an Asian user’s guide.

Please don’t torture your readers that way.

My favourite blog at the moment is http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/ which is a great lesson in writing for a blog as opposed to blogging. That is to say, great writing can carry a blog along whereas sticking to guidelines on the number of words, use of key words, &c stand for nothing if the writing is poor. I consider myself politically on the “other side of the fence” from Cranmer but his writing attracts me and I am a return visitor to his blog.

Other good advice I have received is that the power of a piece is in the first paragraph. Blog readers appear to me to be quite fickle and you have got to grab them in that first paragraph or they simply won’t want to read the rest of your post. Why should they bother? A journalist friend of mine once told me that his editor usually made his mind up about the quality of a piece from the first fifteen words!

Get the beginning right and back it up by quality writing then when people find you they will keep coming back for more.

Incidentally, the first sentence of this comment is fifteen words and I wrote it a number of times in the hope that people may just want to read the rest of the comment.

Note to self: How would Dickens have approached writing a blog? New blog – Social Commentary on the problems in inner city Britain in the style of Dickens – would it work?