Group items tagged

It goes without saying that learning how to create compelling content is a part of one’s success as an online publisher. Reading widely and deeply while consistently honing your writing skills helps a great deal in bettering your prose. Sometimes, it doesn’t hurt to read a few stylebooks/essays on writing by professional teachers or authors. One of these essays on writing is Paul McHenry Roberts’s How to Say Nothing in Five Hundred Words, a brilliantly humorous introduction on writing college compositions. I discovered this essay today and read though easily in one sitting, possibly because it was so well-written and entertaining. It’s a perfect example of the writing techniques listed within.

Most of the “rules” about writing for ezines and newsletters apply to writing posts for your blog, but there are some important differences. Keep these 10 tips in mind and you’ll be publishing great blog content that attracts prospects and clients in your niche market. “Keep in mind the journalist’s rule of 5 W’s in the first paragraph: who, what, why, when and where…. and … Did you remember to ask your readers a question at the end, or something to stimulate readers to comment?”

1. A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. 2. The episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help develop it. 3. The personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. 4. The personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. 5. When the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. 6. When the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description. 7. When a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a Negro minstrel at the end of it. 8. Crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader by either the author or the people in the tale. 9. The personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausably set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. 10. The author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. 11. The characters in tale be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.

And finally, what about the magical number seven? What about the seven wonders of the world, the seven seas, the seven deadly sins, the seven daughters of Atlas in the Pleiades, the seven ages of man, the seven levels of hell, the seven primary colors, the seven notes of the musical scale, and the seven days of the week? What about the seven-point rating scale, the seven categories for absolute judgment, the seven objects in the span of attention, and the seven digits in the span of immediate memory? For the present I propose to withhold judgment. Perhaps there is something deep and profound behind all these sevens, something just calling out for us to discover it. But I suspect that it is only a pernicious, Pythagorean coincidence.

Let's review some best practices for writing text, or pay-per-click ads.

In short, while not every business needs a website and not every website needs a weblog, there are benefits to having a business weblog that offers a mix of article and post styles.

That’s the ironic thing about “personal branding.” The key to effectively building your profile is the value you provide to others and what they say in result, not what you say about yourself.

This is her explanation of the top nine types of stories that people like to talk about. If you’re pitching your company to investors, customers, partners, journalists, vendors, or employees and you don’t use at least one of these story lines, you probably have a problem. And most likely you’re too close to what you’re doing,