Syntax and the Gritty Details of Good Blogging Style

I know plenty of phenomenal writers who try to start a new blog and end with a miserable experience with very few readers. Now there are a plethora of ways to get more readers, such as search engine optimization, finding a good niche, marketing through social media, and soliciting back links (guest posts are a great way to this).Beyond these techniques, however, you must make your blog as readable as possible. And a readable blog post is nothing like a readable English paper. This is where I think many of my writer friends tend to fail at blogging. They haven’t adopted internet syntax, so internet readers find their posts too laborious even if they’re extremely well written. Because, let’s face it, people on the internet are too ADD to actually read.

Sub-headers

Many new bloggers only have a heading (in HTML, those h1-h6 tags) at the top of their post. The rest of the post is full of paragraphs. Here’s an average reader’s thought process for posts like these:

· Cool, interesting title; I guess I’ll have a read.

· Nice introduction. Keep reading.

· Okay, I’m getting tired of this topic, when is the post going to move on.

· ***Reader clicks on a shiny link to a shiny new blog with sub-headers***

Sub-headers are great for guiding a reader to parts of your post that the reader actually wants to read or finds useful. Think of it like a newspaper article; no one reads every article front to back. Segmenting an article or post with sub-headers allows readers to access the information they want more quickly. Otherwise they may give up trying to scour through a block of text to find the information they want.

You don’t necessarily need to use a heading tag to delineate a sub-header. You can simply use a stand-alone, bold-faced caption or word between sections.

Bullets

Bullet points help readers for a variety of reasons:

• · They segment information more clearly than paragraphs.
• · They compliment lists well.
• · They keep writing on topic and organized,

And they can even nest,

Allowing you to add more depth to certain list points.

· There are also a good amount of creative uses of bullet points

(only some were used above)

Paragraph Length

You may have already guessed it, but try to keep your paragraph lengths short. This is all part of the effort to keep your writing segmented into short blocks so that readers can skim to the parts they want.

Also, most blog and reader formats are narrower than, say, Microsoft Word or most term paper formats. There’s a reason why newspapers have such short paragraphs: small column width. Many blog readers are heading in this direction.

By-line:

This guest contribution was submitted by Pamelia Brown, who specializes in writing about associates degree. Questions and comments can be sent to: pamelia.brown@gmail.com.