If you’re in a field like PR, marketing, advertising, or social media, and you have a blog, you have an obligation to write well. Have you ever seen an e-mail from a Blackberry with the signature “Sent from my Blackberry, please excuse the typos.”? My Blackberry signature was “Sent from my Blackberry, but I hope there aren’t any typos, because I’m a professional communicator!”
As a professional communicator, you have to ask yourself just what is it your clients are paying you for, or more simply, what are they buying from you? They are paying you to communicate. That is the literal definition of a professional communicator. And if the product they see in your blog is shoddy, that reflects on you and your company. Your company’s clients, and prospective clients, are constantly observing, and making judgments about, the company’s ability to communicate professionally.
Other than laziness, there are three culprits in the decline in the quality of online writing: e-mail, chat, and SMS. With the introduction of informal online communications, people who generally had to write to a strict set of guidelines were suddenly free to write anything, any way they wanted. No one but your recipient sees your e-mail or IMs goes the argument, so you can relax, and be yourself when you use these tools.
These informal communications tools have given us implied permission for misspellings, incomplete sentences, grammatical lapses, and other abuses of the language. Heap on top of that l33t sp34k and SMS abbreviations and so began the decline and fall of Western civilization.
I feel like I’ve done a stunning job explaining my position (the rant portion of this post), but wouldn’t it be more helpful if I offered some suggestions on how to write better online?* So, herewith I offer just a few hints for improving the writing on your blog.
Go back to the basics: spelling, style, grammar, punctuation, and usage
The fastest way to vastly improve the writing on your blog is to discard the notion that since blogging is “different,” you don’t have to follow the rules. If you write white papers, press releases, briefings, scripts, etc. for clients, you know the tolerance they have (in most cases zero) for bad writing. A professional blog should be written to the same standards you would apply to a final document you would be willing to send to a client.
If you haven’t already done so, get a good dictionary (one with pages and two covers), a thesaurus (you don’t trust Microsoft to give you reliable software, which is their core business, why would you trust them to help you come up with the right word?), a copy of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, and some kind of style guide. If you’re at an agency, maybe you use The Chicago Manual of Style (online/book) or the Associated Press Stylebook (online/book). You probably have these in the agency library, and there are online editions of both of these (though you have to pay to use them).
It’s not enough to let your computer identify misspellings for you (see above RE: thesaurus). Read your post carefully prior to publishing it. Check for the right version of its vs. it’s, their vs. they’re, and your vs. you’re.
Save your post as a draft and have someone else in the company look at before you post it. Or paste it into an e-mail and send it to someone to review.
Understand that online writing is different
Writing effectively online is very much like writing off-line with a few exceptions. Off-line word counts of 700 to 1500 hundred for short to medium length documents don’t apply online. (The blog post you are reading is a long one, and thanks for sticking with it this far.) A typical blog post should be 250-500 words. Paragraphs should generally not be of more than five sentences each.
These are just guidelines, and if you’re in control of your writing, know what you’re doing, and how to do it, your writing may take a very different form, but if you’re having trouble, try these limits.
Informal tone is fine when you are writing a blog, and is generally preferable. That means you can write in the first person. And say “sort of” (if you must). And use sentence fragments. Like that. And be conversational. Just don’t write like you’re preparing a grocery list.
Write like “the greats”
You probably know good writing when you see it. Emulate the writing of the people whose work you respect and read most. If you read something and it moves along quickly, maintains your interest, and offers the occasional surprise or unexpected moment of enlightenment, go back and take a minute to figure out what it is about the writing you found so attractive. Now, go write like that.
* I can almost guarantee there are grammatical and style errors in this post. Now that we are expected to churn out thoughtful, well researched essays every day, it is difficult to turn out a piece that is perfect in every respect. But I won’t stop trying.
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