Photo by Paul Worthington

I thought I’d take a little time out from our regular content flow to write some follow-up thoughts on the post ‘Why Great Writing Doesn’t Matter Online‘. It’s something that many of you had mixed feelings about and I seem not to have made myself as clear as I would have liked. When an argument is read in a dozen different ways by a dozen different people — intelligent people, too — that’s usually the writer’s fault, and I take responsibility for that.

For many, it was as if I had written a post titled ‘Why Writing Doesn’t Matter Online’. The word ‘Great’ didn’t figure in to it. I was at various points seen to be railing against grammar, spelling, and basic expression, advocating impenetrable, careless, or very poor writing, and devaluing anyone who takes pride in their writing work. These things are the opposite of what I hoped to communicate, and it shows that I myself have a long way to go when it comes to writing with clarity.

If this much isn’t known, writing is what sustains me, writing makes me proud, writing causes my life to bloom. If I couldn’t write, my world would be gray. To be seen as anti-writer and anti-writing (even by some) is never what I intended.

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When I studied journalism last year I learned that your ability to write is largely irrelevant when it comes to producing hard news stories (e.g. a young male driver was killed last night when he collided with a passenger bus… those kinds of stories). The words you use are just a vehicle for what’s really important: facts, which ones you include, which ones you leave out and how you present them. In many ways, the words you choose are expected to convey the facts of the matter without getting in their way.

A painting can’t exist without a canvas, but the viewer should, ideally, forget the canvas exists.

I want to suggest that writing on the web is much the same. The fast pace of web browsing and the vast amounts of writing available have created a medium unlike any other.

People don’t read online. Nor do they scan. They extract ideas, resonating with some and disregarding others. They do so at breakneck speed, only slowing down when a particular idea truly warrants it.

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Photo by Libertinus

As I write this, it’s a Friday, and I don’t expect anyone to see this post until roughly six days from now. I have another post to write after this one, but if I don’t finish it tonight, I have plenty of time to do so. I can take as much time as I need to say exactly what I want to say.

It took months for me to develop the habit of writing posts in advance, but it’s now something I would recommend to anyone for all non-news and non-time sensitive content. If you’ve been meaning to develop the habit but haven’t yet been able to do so, resolve to start from now. It is the single best thing you can do to improve the quality of the content you create. Perhaps more importantly, it will take a big chunk of stress out of your content creation routine.

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Photo by Sugar Pond

New visitors to your site want to know straight away what your site has to offer them. A prominent link to an ‘About’ page says: “Want to know what this site is about? The answer is right here.”

Usability should be conversational. A new visitor asks, internally: “What is this site about?” Your About page provides a quick and obvious answer. It’s one of the most powerful tools you can use to turn first-time visitors into loyal readers.

Once you have an ‘About’ page, though, the question becomes: what on earth do I put here?

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Study of a Woman’s Hands by Leonardo Da Vinci

If you’ve seen the creation process behind a drawing or painting you’ll know that artists rarely produce a finished artwork without a rough sketch beneath. What starts off looking like a lopsided scarecrow eventually becomes a beautifully rendered person. The canvas that begins as a few splotches of color eventually morphs into a life portrait.

The artist knows generally what they want to paint. What they might not be sure on until later is the detail. This model is incredibly useful to us. As producers of written content we can adapt this strategy to what we write.

This is a simple tip, but it can increase the quality of what you write and allow you to produce articles faster.

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