Blogging Tips

As I’ve mentioned before in another article, you can have all the best promotional materials working for you and have spent tons of cash on the best Internet Marketing services and none of it will mean a thing unless you’ve got great content that includes good copy editing. Use all the best tools to drive all the traffic you want to your site, but if the content waiting at the end of that cyber road is badly constructed, you’ll get visitors that click away quickly in record numbers.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

For those of you not familiar with that little bit of French, it means the more things change, the more they stay the same. And that applies to the things that I learned as a journalist about copyediting for newspapers and magazines that work today on the web. That said, here are a few little rules that should help you to polish the content writing you use in blogs.

Less is More

As far as online editing is concerned, that means the fewer words you use the more impact they will have. Consider the following example.

The dog that was the color of the snow that falls in winter jumped over the farmer’s fence that zigzagged beside the road.

Now, that same sentence with some editing.

The white dog jumped over the snake rail fence.

See how just a few jumps of logic were able to sharpen the clarity of the content writing? Everyone knows the color of snow is white (less words used) and most people are familiar enough with a snake rail fence to conjure up the image without the description. As far as needing to mention the fence is beside a road, that’s where most people imagine a fence to be and although that’s not always true, it is more often than not.

The idea here is simple. Many times writers are excited enough about the point they want to make they throw the whole ‘kitchen sink’ into the sentence to make sure the reader knows exactly what they mean. Often, the sentence shines more brightly and the intended meaning is clearer when the number of words and phrases is paired down.   

Watch Unnecessary Words

There are words that you can do without. These are generally words that you might think add something to the blog that you’re writing, but when you edit you find that they don’t really add anything. As you might imagine, that is one of those words.

Another group that you can usually do without are what I like to call the ‘ly’ modifiers. When I edit fiction I see lots of examples of writers attributing dialogue with phrases like, ‘He said guiltily.’  That tells the readers how the character is feeling; it doesn’t show them in any way they can relate to. Remember that when you’re using these modifiers you can do some editing by deciding is the sentence still works when they’re left out or if you can describe what the modifier looks or feels like to elicit a stronger reader connection.

So, ‘He said guiltily’ me be reworked to ‘He said, looking down at his shoes as he spoke.’