Yet more tips on writing content for your blog

Posted Sunday, November 20, 2005 at 1:48pm in Blogging  | 

I attended my journalism lecture this afternoon and today’s topic was about writing personal columns in newspapers. You know the ones, the red tops usually have some celebrity giving their opinion on recent issues in the news. The broadsheets tend to have specialist writers giving their specialist opinion. For example, Jeff Jarvis writes a specialist column for the technology section in the Media Guardian.

We were given a guideline hand-out on the style we should try to use when writing a personal column and I think a lot could be applied to blogging. I’ll post the list, but first I must stress that this isn’t my own work. I have taken it from a hand-out from university. So I can’t claim to have written any of it.

1. Don’t simply rant.
2. Good pieces of work are well written and have something important to say.
3. Don’t simply write what you feel but use it as a place to develop a simple argument.
4. Try to have a particular voice and an entertaining style.
5. Make your work built on careful reporting, analysing and assessment.
6. Focus on one subject.
7. Present new insights.
8. Stimulate readers to think and see subjects from a different angle.
9. Show rather than tell.
10. Use examples and stories rather than confront reader with bare opinions.
11. Focus on the issue and not the experience of the writer.
12. Emphasise intelligence and argument rather than emotion.
13. Always be consistent in tone.
14. Choose a voice and stick to it.
15. Remember. More than one mood will distract the reader

Technorati tags:
blogging, blogcontent

Related Posts

• Information overload in the Knowledge Economy 06.16.
• Carphone Warehouse listens 05.25.
• CIPR Northern Conference 08 09.21.
• BBC's link love 06.17.
• Facebook: the lobbying boiling pot 02.12.

• Next post: « University of Sunderland Blog Conference - Result!
• Previous post: Tools to get the job done »