Men reading newspapers displayed outdoors

Image by James Cridland

This post is a plea to my fellow bloggers. And it is about how we write. I don’t mean this to be another plea that quality writing matters. Those not already convinced probably won’t be convinced by anything I say (I don’t have anything new to say about this.).

This post is a plea to change the model. At the moment the dominant model for writing in the blogosphere seems to be copywriting (that is the kind of writing you see in advertisements). This has it’s attractions, especially for those of us who want to make our living from blogging.

But, I think it is a bad model.

As has often been observed: people like to buy but hating being sold to.

I don’t think people will come back to our blogs if all they find are repeated pitches to buy stuff.

But what about if it isn’t selling? What about if it is just the model for writing?

It does have its virtues - it emphasises writing that is accessible and emphasises saying what you mean simply. But there are other models of writing that do this too. The most common being journalism (there are also literary giants such as Hemingway, Steinbeck and Simenon who wrote this way). I am begging any bloggers reading this to use journalism as their model for writing not copywriting (I suspect the brilliance of Hemingway, Steinbeck and Simenon is beyond most of us).

The drawbacks of the copywriting style are immense.

  • For those of us doing informational blogs it is important to not just persuade but to provide useful and relevant information: to tell more than one side of a story. (Our credibility - the currency of the blogosphere - is at stake.)
  • And for all its pleas to write engagingly the copywriting style becomes tedious and predictable.

After a while all those active verbs make me feel like I’m being shouted at. All those promises that this (new, latest, best, updated, improved) product is going to change (revolutionise, transform) my life begin to seem doubtful. All those rousing final calls to action (without delay) leave me cold.

[I could write a whole post on how loathsome is the long form sales letter, but I'll spare you.]

Journalism suits blogging because blogging is a kind of journalism - we provide mostly free content, and fund it either by selling products or advertisements (just like newspapers and magazines - or the other mass media). And the different kinds of blogs are pretty similar to the different kinds of journalism - news, celebrity, topical.

Journalism has the virtue of being more of a craft than an art and has been tailored to working under pressure (and most bloggers do feel the pressure to keep the content coming). [Just btw I think it was Tom Wolfe the US journalist who said that he would have a one class journalism school. The class would be: stand in a corridor for five hours outside a door, someone pokes their head out the door and says, "No comment"; write a thousand words.]

Journalism is focused on saying what needs to be said in an accessible and straight forward manner. It has the freedom to tell a story - the form that is still the most engaging for people. But it is not confined to selling. It is a style that can include all the styles of blogs.

If you are interested in developing your writing as a blogger there are a tremendous number of resources. Some of the best are old books based on rhetoric. These lay out a model for most kinds of writing and give lots of practice. There are also lots more modern books on writing well (though these tend to be about biography or fiction). And there are all the books about how to write journalism.

Here are some links to sites that I found by doing a google search. All of them I think have something of value for those of us who want to get better as writers.

www.lifewrite.com using screenwriting as the model - and the screen writing focused on telling a story. Free lessons.
Journalism61 on writing in chunks
The Four Pillars of Writing Exceptional Blogs by Leon Babauta who has a very successful blog (Zen Habits).
The Journalism Iconoclast questions whether writing for newspapers is the appropriate model for on line writing.

There are also numerous excellent sites on writing well in the blogosphere.
My own favourite on writing in general is Bob Younce’s The Writing Journey.
My favourite on more business focused writing (especially marketing) is Sonia Simone’s Remarkable Communication.

There is a series coming up on the skills of journalism (more broad than writing) applied to blogging, over the next few days at BillyProBlogger.

Do I think that I’m a brilliant writer? No. But I do think that writng well matters. And I’m doing my best to get better at it.

What do you think about writing on blogs? Perhaps you think it matters not at all. It may be that you battle to write more simply, or perhaps more elegantly. Let me know what you think about the writing you read on blogs in the comments. I’d love to hear what you think.


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