Writing is writing. But what you’re doing is something else: business blogging.
You’re talking about what’s going on in your world, giving your perspective, sharing your expertise. There’s an element to what you’re writing that makes it stand out from other content you produce, like brochures or white papers.
That element is speed.
As a business blogger, you need to produce content. Regularly. It has to be interesting. Valuable. Useful. And it has to be quick; if you’re like most other small business bloggers, writer is just one tiny hat among the several hundred others you’re wearing.
So you have to be quick and you have to be good. It reminds me of that old sign you’d sometimes see: ”It can be quick, it can be good, or it can be cheap: pick any two”. It’s arguable whether or not blogging is cheap; there’s a significant time investment if you’re going to do it right. But for now, let’s say that one’s a given, and we’re going with the other two. Quick and good.
How do you make that happen? One way is to be a better editor. It’s one thing to crank out some ideas, but it’s another to make them readable and interesting.
Here are five editing tips you can use to help make your writing both quick and good:
Don’t Stop: It’s not quite stream-of-consciousness, but you shouldn’t stop writing once you start. Keep pushing instead of working on that “perfect” paragraph. William Zinsser has some excellent examples of writing through your mistakes (the opposite of editing as you go) in his book On Writing Well. There is no slower way to edit than to do it as you write.
Get Consistent: Build some style into your writing that you go back to over and over. For example, use two spaces after sentences. Or start to understand that you like to begin sentences with “And” or “But”. Get familiar with where you like to use colons. The more comfortable you are with the devices of writing, the less of a challenge it’ll be when you go to edit: you’ll already know what you want your words to sound like. Consistency builds speed in editing.
Read: Without exception, good writers are good readers. With 14 bazillion blogs out there, you should have no trouble finding something to read that you’re interested in, and that can help provide some ideas about style for your own writing. Don’t get too caught up trying to write like others, but do pay attention to what other writers, good writers, are doing. This blogging stuff is like anything else- there is technique to be learned. Reading a lot helps you be a better, quicker editor.
Read (part II): I say it a lot, because I feel it’s the most neglected (and probably the best) piece of editing advice I’ve come across: read your stuff out loud before you publish. There are tons of reasons to do this, not the least of which is because you want, to a large extent, to write like you talk. Also, it’s hard to miss mistakes if you hear them. Reading out loud is the cruise missile of editing. You can cover pretty much everything with it.
Cut. Cut Again. Cut Some More. The reason I saved this for last is because it’s probably the most widely known editing tip, but maybe the most misunderstood, especially when you start to think about writing in terms of being quick and good. When you go through what you’ve written, what are you looking to cut? Well, start with paragraphs (make them smaller). Then sentences (make two short ones out of one long one). Then words (don’t use “unornamented” when you mean “plain”). The thing is, once you get used to those inevitable cuts when you’re editing, you’ll start to incorporate the cutting process into your writing, making your posts better, at the same time you’re producing them faster.
Well, what about it, editors? What am I missing here? Can you be quick and good, or are they mutually exclusive?
Tags: blogs, content, content marketing, getting started in social media, marketing blogs, writing