How My High School English Teacher Can Make You a Better Blogger
Don Lourcey, my senior year AP Literature teacher, is the man I credit with giving me the tools I needed to write. By the time I made it to his class I had already filled dozens of journals, but it wasn't writing of substance.
Mr. Lourcey was in his late forties and had ginger-colored hair. He held his students to college-level writing standards. His class marked a turning point in my writing career. I learned that good writing takes discipline. Each time I reached for a cliché, he sent me back to my desk. My hope is that by sharing the most important lessons I learned from Mr. Lourcey, your writing will benefit.
5 ways to strengthen your blog posts
1. You wrote this an hour before class I know if you wrote your post in a hurry. It's okay if you did, but I can tell. So can readers of your blog. Some blog readers don't mind if you threw it together on your way to "class." How many times have you heard the admonishment, "just blog! It doesn't matter what you blog about!"
On the contrary, it does matter what you blog about - and how much time you put into crafting an entry.
2. Cuss words They don't strengthen your writing, they weaken it. In high school I was proud to (finally) be old enough to use them, so my journal entries were rife with f-bombs. Not so anymore. I'm not a prude about it, but I believe, generally speaking, profanity weakens your writing. (Excluding humor essayists. You can drop as many f-bombs as you like.)
3. Nothing to say For this challenge I've said it's okay to change the prompts to meet your needs, and many of you have. Which is great! Before you publish, "I have nothing to say about this, so I'm not posting today," think again. Write only when you have something to add. And you always have something to add if you edit prompts to fit your needs.
Follow up on that point - if you skip a day or a week or a month of blogging, there's no need to lead with "Guys, I'm so so so sorry I didn't post yesterday like I promised I would, it' just that [...]" Skip it. We know you're busy. Tell us why we should be reading right now. It's not a problem if you miss a day of blogging. We probably didn't even notice.
4. The Royal I I-statements have their place in writing. If you wonder if you're talking about yourself a bit too much (we all do sometimes), count up the number of times you say "I" in a piece. Then count up the number of times you say "you." If "I" is double the number of "you" mentions, switch it up!
This assumes you want to create a dialog with your blog. If you don't, you can turn off your comments and really make it all about you. There is a time to consider your reader when you blog. That time is when you edit your draft. If you have comments enabled, I assume you want a dialog. Consider us when you edit.
5. Grammar If I'm reading this New York Times piece about just how hard it is to be a profitable seller on Etsy and I click over to read your post, will I notice a disparity in grammar usage? If I have to read a sentence twice, I won't. Make reading pleasant for your audience.
I know rules are meant to be broken. I use these guidelines when I write. What did your high school English teacher teach you that has stayed with you since graduation? Any disagreements with what Mr. Lourcey taught us?
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Thursday, December 17, 2009
Reader Comments (13)
Your tips are fantastic and I agree with them, but don't always follow them, particularly in a blogging format. In addition, I actually break many of the rules I learned in highschool and even college classes, including, most importantly:
1) Never start a sentence with a preposition.
2) State your argument in the first paragraph and repeat it in your conclusion.
I break these because I write my blog to reflect the way I think and speak. I use commas and periods as pauses in thought. And I frequently pause in mid thought.
The most valuable lesson my English teachers taught me was not to fear language, including "big words." I am grateful for vocabulary.
This is SUCH a great reminder and great advice! I feel really fortunate to have had English teachers in high school back in 10th and 11th grade that told us that our college professors wouldn't cut us any slack and that we had better get a grip on the basics of how to write. They assigned "The Elements of Style" as homework and book report assignments. That kind of standard not only taught me how to write, but has made me really come to love it. Thanks for the reminders - I'm bookmarking this!
how nice, gwen, for these reminders! there are, of course, those writers always in some mode of subverting form such that we want the isolated disparity of something that does differ, very much, in tone and style from the nyt ... for various reasons. the wonderful thing about the blogosphere (i don't like that term much) is that it is truly a nebulous that can account for so much variation. it's like we're all different tips on the same fractal, or spiraling off into our own soon to be determined patterns. but sloppiness, or maybe moreso neatness, and precision, matter, even in the exact chaos of fractals. thanks for a thoughtful poignant post!
Sloppy writing shows such disrespect for your readers. Yes, writing a well-crafted piece is hard work. If it was easy anyone could be a writer. Sadly, everyone seems to think they are.
Thanks for letting humor essayists off the hook on the "f-bombs." I try to use them as I would cumin. A little goes a long way.
I enjoyed this post, particularly points one and three. My favourite bloggers publish thoughtfully and never apologize for lapses between posts. They care for words on a screen equally to pen on paper. They write as often as needed to convey a story, never more.
That would be my sixth point - tell a story. Every piece of writing has a story within it - even this post's simple list was framed around Mr. Lourcey and his standards. Stories are important, and too often neglected when "publish" is a writer's main goal.
Thank you, Gwen.
Thanks Gwen, these are awesomesauce tips.
Cheers.
Thanks Gwen for these points to remember! Especially #4, "I" seems to be my favorite word lately and it's getting nauseating even for me. Keeping this in mind altered the course of my latest post, making for a stronger, hopefully more interesting piece. Good tips for anyone who wishes to improve their writing, even non-professionals if only for the sake of bettering themselves.
Not everyone who blogs is trying to be a writer, some just want to join the conversation. Which is a good thing, giving voices to the previously-unheard and all that. Over time some bloggers can develop into wonderful writers. Other blogs are just fun to read. The thing about the "fun" blogs though is that if they never evolve, individual readers eventually move on to other, more well-crafted and thought-provoking blogs. Gwen, I discovered your blog just a couple months ago - it's now a daily read. Thank you!
Is that picture at the top one of your actual notebooks? I only ask because I noticed the pen is a Retro. I have one myself and love it. Is that your writing instrument of choice or do you prefer something else? I'm a bit of a pen geek, which is why I am asking.
Thank you so much for the blog-writting etiquette reminders! I am, by no means, a perfect writer and I make common mistakes occasionally. However, I think a lot of people forget to take pride in their writing. It's one thing to have a typo here or there but it's another to consistently make mistakes because you don't read over your own post before hitting "publish" or you just don't about those mistakes!
On a side note, I have a hard time remembering the "lessons" taught to me from my english teachers or professors. It seems like the majority of my english teachers in high school and professors in college were on the brink of a mental breakdown!
I always write to prompts with whatever comes to my mind, not necessarily directly in response to the question. Also, I completely agree about the "I'm so sorry. I'm so busy that I haven't blogged recently." Who cares?!? Just write!
My English teachers didn't talk about any of this stuff! It was always about having us read Great Literature and then churn out 30-minute essays in class, in hopes we'd practice ourselves into brilliance and get 5s on the AP exam. They taught us how to write--but not edit. It took a copy editor at my first full-time writing job to show me how little I actually knew. Take that, for instance. "That" can be deleted?! No one tells you these things! (I tried to make an inside joke by putting "that" inside every sentence of my copy editor's birthday card, but she graciously insisted she never read personal stuff like an editor.) Ruthless and gracious--that's the way to be!
Thanks for sharing these interesting and helpful information.
Very informative and interesting article.
Regards,
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