How To Write For The Web

By Lars in life No Comments

Here are my thoughts on the craft of writing:

For one, I really suck at it, always have. My SAT verbal score was 300 and something, and generally writing assignments in my school days were crisis events for me. (Didn’t know I had ADHD back then) Nevertheless, in recent years I’ve become an avid reader and have grown to really appreciate good prose.

I’ve studied a ton of blogs out there and I have to conclude that most of them produce garbage, content that’s either poorly written, looks and/or sounds phony/fraudulent, or in many cases, was produced by robots. Great bloggers are rare and I look forward to promoting them in the near future. Chris Coyier posted a list of his favorites

In a recent post by Chris Gillebeau, he described how individuals starting blogs can expect their first year of activity to be fairly lousy. A pretty sobering thought. He was just being brutally honest, a trademark of his. How does he do it? Perhaps he uses dictation software too? Whatever his tools, his workflow HAS TO BE EASY FOR HIM, because he writes so damn much. Same goes for all the other superstar bloggers out there.

Way back I remember learning about the concept of “content is king” but hadn’t completely understood it until just recently. Recently at San Antonio WordPress Meetup there was this old fellow who complained that when he installed a new theme, how disappointed he was to find the page looking so empty, feeling as though he was ripped off somehow by the developer. This is something that I too had experienced often myself, which is why I experimented with all sorts of Latin gibberish and other bot-generated filler text.

Mark Levy is a popular writing coach who’s inspired me a lot. He makes the point that writers should produce as much draft content as possible. Essentially, that there is no such thing as too much material to start with. Levy makes the case that writers who are concerned with the readability of their draft writings are essentially handicapping themselves. He claims the best ideas are summoned with a wreckless kind of spirit, as there are NO RULES you need to follow. Whatever it takes for you to get to the finish line is up to the writer alone. ONLY the finished result should be judged!

Ever since then, I’ve been on a quest to find out how I could adopt this strategy without losing my mind. Although I can type at 60 words per minute, that’s still not fast enough to be able to sustain over a long period of time in order to gather along a large volume of words in a short amount of time. I’ve done some experiments and have confirmed, at my typing speed, just what the software makers claim: that software dictation produces results three times faster than typing. It’s not just that my fingers get tired after a lot of typing, but also I get restless from sitting in one position for too long. Writing using dictation software allows me to stretch and move around while I generate content, which is essential for maintaining a fluid line of thought.

In fact, at this very moment I’m lying on the floor in my studio with a USB mic in my hand, dictating this draft using speech recognition software. This still feels super creepy to me, but it’s a viable approach I’ve considered for so long but never attempted it until now. Of all of the tools that are at professional writers’ disposal, it seems to me that voice dictation stands above all the rest in terms of raw performance.

So why haven’t I been using this software? I suppose it’s the way you feel sitting in a room all alone, talking without somebody in front of you who’s listening. Really, it’s so embarrassing, like you’re some hobo on the streets babbling to hisherself! Perhaps we all have that potential in us, it’s just that most of us instinctively keep their inner voice silent.

So, in summary, here are my top priorities for a successful blog post:

  • The writing should represent the topic well and be carefully structured.
  • The author shouldn’t quote too much from sources gathered online.
  • Blog posts should be no shorter than 500 words. These days it’s common to find blog posts that are a mere footnote, like a bloated tweet. The solution? Put more effort into your writing! Post less often, consolidate your notes/text snippets and to meaningful messages and dedicate yourself to a schedule that can accommodate this extra work. Effective use of tagging can help allieviate the bad habit of organizing by blog title.
  • Post on a regular schedule. Twice weekly is common. Once a month should be the minimum.
  • Keep a few drafts on hand to resort to so that you don’t have to rush a post to make your schedule. On rare occasions, a good blog post can be drafted and published in one day, or even one sitting.

Thanks for reading!