Your Writing Style

A compelling writing style with content that is stimulating and interesting will be recognized almost immediately by your visitors.

They will settle down to read on your site for longer, and – more importantly – they are much more likely to come back.

You may be saying to yourself at this point, “But I’m no prize winning author. I don’t even know if I can write that well – or at all. I’m not used to writing. How can I have a compelling writing style?”

Well, the good news is that you can learn some basic techniques to help you write lively, interesting web articles and posts. You may be very surprised at what you can achieve with some basic guidelines to follow.

TIP: Writing well is a skill that is learned through practice. You may start slowly and uncertainly, but you will get much better and faster the more you do it. The only way to write well is to write a lot. As with most skills, practice makes perfect.

Above all, remember that writing is communication, and you have to establish a connection between yourself and your reader.

The easiest and quickest way to establish a connection is through your personality. Who you are should come through in your writing.

Everyone has a unique voice. It’s just a question of putting it out there in print.

Here are some tips to start you off:

• Write in a manner that's entirely natural to you. Avoid any kind of pretense, insincerity or academic sounding writing. This is a conversation, not a lecture.
  

• Use words and phrases that you would use naturally in speech – without any swearing of course.
  

• Let your views and passions emerge through your writing. State your opinions. You may ruffle a few feathers, but debate and controversy mean visitors are involved. At the very least they won't fall asleep reading.
  

• Use imagery and metaphors to make your writing more vivid and interesting. Expressions like: ‘ruffle a few feathers’, for instance, make your writing less stuffy and pompous. In speech we use imagery and metaphor all the time - to get a point across, to make a joke, to express emotion. Just do the same thing in your writing.
  

• Write for your visitors. Imagine who you're writing for and ‘talk’ directly to them in your posts. Use ‘you’ to address your reader if it works in the post.
  

• Use the spoken informal form of verbs – it’s, don’t, can’t, here's.
  

An important part of making your content visitor-friendly is how it looks.

A dense wall of text stretching endlessly onward down the page puts most people off.

Doesn’t it put you off when you land on pages like that – no matter how desperate you may be to get the information you need?

So when you write – pay attention to how you're displaying the text on the page. Some tips to get you started:

• When you are writing a post, click on ‘save and edit’ frequently and scroll down to view the page as it will look when you hit publish. Don’t just rely on the text editing box to show you.
  

• Use more frequent paragraphs than you would normally - online, keep your paragraphs to just one or two sentences.

• Use sub-headings with bold or colored fonts – blended with your site’s color scheme, of course. Make the sub-headings interesting to carry the reader into the next block of text.
  

• Use images to as a visual echo of the content and wrap text around them.
  

• Use lists and bullets to get your points across. Lists allow you to convey bite-sized chunks of information without overloading brains – like this one!
  

• Use blockquotes to emphasize paragraphs in a longer post. Write the paragraph you want to enclose in blockquotes and then in html view insert the tag: <blockquote> </blockquote> around it, starting and ending on a new line.
  

• Good layout of the copy will invite the visitor to read it. But you still need to hold their attention and make it easy for them to carry on reading and scrolling down the page.
  

• Vary the length of your sentences. There is a rhythm in the written word, and sentences which are mostly all the same length create a sense of monotony.
  

• Use a lot of short sentences – around six words or so. However, using only short sentences will create a choppy impression.
  

• Use correct grammar, spelling and punctuation. Badly punctuated and grammatically incorrect writing is more difficult to read. Use a spell checker before posting.
  

• Keep your posts to around 500 words maximum and vary the length. Include plenty of short posts, 250-400 words or shorter.
  

One of the quickest ways to acquire a new skill is to learn from someone who already does it well.

You may have some ideas of your own particular favorite writers, but here are some top bloggers who write great copy and have lots of advice to offer on the subject of writing good content. Brian Clarke’s blog in particular is full of useful tips to turn you into a really excellent copywriter.

Brian Clarke: http://www.copyblogger.com

Darren Rowse: http://www.problogger.com