Format your guest bloggers’ posts for maximum impact
When you go to the effort of snaring a guest writer for your blog, especially when the person is an influential “catch,” please follow some simple formatting tips. These tips will improve your readers’ experience and boost your guest’s visibility. This will reflect well on you. Tip 1: Introduce your guest Don’t plunge directly into […]
Three Decisions You Need to Make Before Setting Up Your New Blog
Elizabeth Kricfalusi’s Tech for Luddites blog makes technical topics easy for me to understand. She’s also a friend with whom I share a fondness for squirrels and Japan, where we both lived. I’m delighted that her guest post advises you on some of the first decisions you’ll make when you set up your blog. I […]
Save your trash to feed your blog
Writers often cram too many ideas and facts into their first drafts. This happens frequently in blog posts. It can even happen in longer pieces, such as white papers, scholarly journal articles, or books. You need to trim the excess to polish your final version. However, you don’t need to lose your extra content forever. […]
Guide your readers better than this trail guided me
I got lost. A poorly marked hiking trail sent my husband and me in one wrong direction and then another before we found our way. This reminded me of how writing that lacks trail markers sends readers astray. The best trail markers for your writing are topic sentences. A strong topic sentence—the first sentence of […]
Please edit like a traitor
As a writer, your first loyalty should not be to yourself. Instead, you should betray yourself, as Donald Murray suggests in Writing to Deadline: The Journalist at Work. Here’s what Murray says: Effective writers turn traitor to their own copy, reading what they have written through the eyes of an enemy reader who has no […]