Some Knowledge

If you want to make your writing easy to understand you should start with the main point.  State your subject clearly.  Use short sentences.  Keep your word choice simple.

Write in short paragraphs with one idea per paragraph.

If you have a lot of points to make use the bulleted list.  Do not do anything stupid to make your words hard to read.  This means do not use confusing backgrounds or fonts.  It is impossible to read some websites because the background obliterates the text.

Do not use long complicated sentences that confuse the reader.  Do not write in the passive voice.  Use a “subject, verb, object” sentence structure.  Do not misspell  words.

Arrange your pages in short columns so that it is easy for the eye to follow from one line to the next.  Try to avoid long passages that require scrolling.  Clearly state the point of your message.  Do not confuse or mislead the reader.

Clearly identify who is speaking in quoted text.  Make sure your facts are correct.  Be honest.

Avoid jargon and overuse of acronyms.  Summarize your conclusions at the start of a piece.  Most readers will merely scan your work.  State the facts in a simple manner.  Complicated structures are not style, they are sophistry.

With a little practice you can write easily understood prose.  You want to communicate and convince with your words, not confuse and annoy.

The key is to write something that people are interested in.  How do you find out what interests people?  That’s a question a lot of people ask themselves.  There is such easy access to information on the net these days, you can pretty much write about whatever interests you, and then let people find your article.  You can write just about anything and somebody will have some interest in it.  Even something like a poem can attract attention.

Still, the fact remains:  If you want a lot of readers you need to write about something that a lot of people care about.  You can be pretty safe in the assumption that people on the Internet will have some interest in computers.  This is the one thing any Internet publishing will have in common.  You need some sort of computer to access the net, even if that computer is nothing more than a PDA or an IPhone.  If you write articles about computers there will be a ready-made audience for your writing on the net.

There are many things besides computers that people have in common.  We all have bodies, and we all have some kind of health issues.  Even if people are healthy they are still concerned with how to stay healthy and how to get more healthy.  If you write about how to improve the body, there will be a ready audience for your work.  You do not have to be a doctor to write about health, but you do need to do your research.  It would be unfortunate if you gave people bad advice on maintaining their health and somebody suffered some kind of problem or injury because of something you wrote.  Still, there are books available at libraries and stores that can give you a good foundation in health.  You can even audit college courses on many things by looking for lecture podcasts on the web.  UC Berkeley has many webcasts from different classes if you are interested in picking up some free knowledge.

No matter what you write, if you post it in some place that is accessible to the public, people will eventually find it.  You can maximize your visibility by choosing a good title for your work.   The title of your blog or web page is the first thing a search engine or person surfing the web will see.  You need something that clearly states what your page is about.  If you give your piece a title that has nothing to do with the content of your page you will just confuse people.  Worse than confusion, people will feel misled in looking at your work.  If you lose the trust of your reader you may as well have not written anything.  A good title is short and to the point.  It will convey the subject or theme of your piece and lead the reader into viewing your writing.

The important thing in any piece of writing is the information it contains.  Suppose you are writing a review of some automobile.  You will want to look up all the facts about that car you can.  You will want to know what engines it comes with, what accessories are standard or optional, what colors you can get it in, what kinds of interior it can be equipped with, and what power options are available.  You will also want to know what kind of mileage it gets, what kind of acceleration performance it has, what safety options it can be equipped with, and what tires it uses.  All these facts are the meat and potatoes of any article you write.  You will also want to have information on how the car handles, how comfortable it is to drive, how is the visibility when you are driving, and what entertainment options does it come with.  In short, you will want to look up all the information about your subject that anyone could possibly want to know.

Once you have all the facts for your article it is just a question of putting them all together in an interesting story structure.  You might want to describe a test drive you took, if you test drove the car you are writing about.  You might want to describe how you found out about all the different things about this vehicle.  You will definitely want to make an interesting framework on which you can post the different facts you have discovered.  Your piece should be easy to read and have an enjoyable format.  You are not just trying to cram facts down people’s throats, you are cajoling them into knowledge of your subject.  Use active verbs and descriptive phrases that convey concrete images.  You should describe your own feelings, but do not try to project feelings onto your readers.  If your intention is to sell something, point out all the advantages that ownership will give to the potential customer.  If your intention is just to tell an interesting story, focus on the story of how you interacted with your subject.

In your style of writing it is best to be as simple as possible in relating your story.  Big words and complicated sentence structures only add to confusion.  If you use a word processor run your work through the grammar checker and check your statistics.   You should have some indication of grade level, the Fleishmann-Kinkaide rating I think it is called.  The lower this number the better, to a point.  It is considered best to write to about a 5th grade level.  Long sentences, big words, and convoluted structures will make this level go up.  Also it is best to try and avoid the passive voice.  Say:  He picked up the bag.  Not:  The bag was picked up by him.  Active voice gives a piece a moving quality that makes it read easily.  A grammar checker can point out all these problems.  Do not rely on the computer to write your piece though, as often grammar checkers and spell checkers make mistakes.  Use your own judgment in editing any piece of work.

If you write a good article that has useful information, people will eventually find it if it is posted on the Internet.  You do not have to worry about keyword optimization or anything else if you have good facts in your story.  The facts are the keywords.  If you write clearly in a simple style that people can understand you will attract people to view your work.  If you can give some value to your audience as far as the work you have done in researching your piece, then they will return to see your future efforts at writing.  The Field of Dreams is your work.  The reason people read your work is the benefit they derive from it.  If you place valuable information in an accessible format you will attract attention.

I got bored with sitting around the house this afternoon trying to think of something to write about.  I got my hat and coat on and took the truck out to Barnes and Nobles.  The store was not very crowded today, and I spent some time looking through the remainder racks before I headed back to the business and Internet section.

I was looking for a good book on blogging.  I have seen books on this subject before.  These books seemed kind of basic and useless compared to the information anyone can get online for free.  Still, I looked around.  Blogging books were squirreled away in several places.  I found one on the e-business rack, two more hidden in with small business, another couple in with web applications, and one or two in with personal computing.  I looked over all these books.  Apparently they were written for people who were completely clueless and did not know what a blog was.  I mean, I might not have a good idea what to write about in my blogs to attract attention, but I have been keeping a blog, or rather several of them, for years.

One of these books was $40 and included a lot of programming code for making your own blog application.  Why would I bother doing that if there are suitable apps available for free?  I’m not about to write a program to blog anything.  Another book was all about how to get different design elements into your blog.  Why bother?  I like my minimalist design.  I had to point and click twice to set that up.  One very slim book was about how to run a blog as a business.  Well, that was interesting, except three fourths of the book was explaining what a blog is, not how to use one to generate money.  There was one chapter that said basically sell advertising and affiliate products, when you make money incorporate.  I stood there and read all the info in that book in under a minute just flipping pages.

“The Everything Blogging Book” was very basic but it covered a lot of ground.  I liked the broad range of information.  The book is filled with words, not a lot of pictures and diagrams.  It cost $15.  I stood there reading the chapter headings in this book and then set it back on the shelf and went to look at writing books for a while.  There was also a book on how to use WordPress, but I thought to myself, “Isn’t all this in a help file somewhere?”

I wasted some time looking through books on how to write and about the writing business.  I almost yawned.  I’ve read so much about writing over the years that the whole concept bores me.  Writing is nothing more than typing up words that mean something.  Selling your writing involves finding a buyer.  I looked over all the books, then went back to the business section to see if I had missed anything.  I ended up buying the everything book.  It’s fairly basic, but there was a lot of different material in this book and the writing was interesting and to the point.

I think I will probably spend the rest of the afternoon reading.  I’m a bit worn out from writing too much in this blog.  I have 51 posts now or something ridiculous like that and have only been writing in this blog for a week and a half.  Maybe tomorrow I will find something interesting to say.  For now, I’m taking the afternoon off to do some research.  If I learn anything useful I may write about it.

I’m sitting here at my computer trying to think up something to write about.  I just got done looking over the long list of things people search for on Google Trends.  Number three on that list was the tuatara.  Apparently, the tuatara, which only lives on a few islands surrounding New Zealand now that imported rats and cats and dogs have made it extinct on the big islands, is more closely related to the dinosaur than it is to modern lizards.  The creature has some very interesting aspects.  The tuatara lives for 60 to 100 years.  It has a third eye below the skin of the top of its head that may regulate its sleep cycles.  The tuatara also has supposedly the fastest rate of evolutionary change of any animal, which is odd, because it hasn’t changed much in a couple hundred million years.

Well, this was all interesting material, but, I did not feel like writing some kind of report about some odd endangered reptile.  Mind you, I like reptiles, just, why would I copy the report on the Discovery channel site for my blog like I saw done three times on Google Trends blog results?  Do people just copy stories they find on the Internet for their own posts?  This seems really lame.  Almost as lame as Private Label Rights articles.

I found a website yesterday that gives away free PLR articles.  I said what the heck, check them out.  So, I left my email with their autoresponder and after their email made it through the spam filter I confirmed my membership in the five article a day free PLR club and downloaded my free prize of a hundred articles and the five for the day articles and unzipped them and looked them over.  It was very interesting material.  Is anyone interested in the evolution of teddy bears?  I am not even slightly interested in that.  I read one of the articles about aerobic exercise?  Do you know that if you do aerobics you can lose weight?  Not even worth printing my name on that one.  No wonder this stuff is free.  Talk about boring generic articles.  I wonder how many people visit random blogs looking for interesting content for their own blogs?  I’ve seen stuff posted to different blogs that looks exactly the same.  That’s the problem with electronic media, it is as simple as point and click to make a copy.

Every once in a while when I get really bored I will look for jokes on the Internet.  You have to read a lot of lousy material to find even one good joke.  Sometimes you hit a rich vein of humor and find several jokes all on the same site.  Usually, you end up reading the same thing over and over again.  It would be easier to just make up my own jokes.  I have a book on writing comedy.  The book is pretty lame.  Most of the jokes in this book are not even funny.  I don’t know who writes all this un-funny humor.  It gets on television too.  Lame jokes are a curse that spreads like a plague.

So, how does anyone think up things to write about?  It would have to be something that interests or concerns you.  I’m trying to think of what interests or concerns me now.  I’m interested in making money, who isn’t?  I’m interested in how the web is going to look in a few years.  Will it turn into a sewer of advertising like television?  Probably, but there is more to the Internet than business.  Do I have any hobbies that may be of interest to other people?  Yes, I used to enjoy experimenting with radio-frequency electronic circuits.  Kind of a niche topic.  Not everybody is interested in how wireless works.

There’s an interesting term, wireless.  They used to call radio wireless when it was first invented.  This was because all they could send was Morse code and Morse code was commonly used on the telegraph, so when radio came out it was competing directly with the wired communication system.  Wireless is the old Victorian term for radio.  They started using the term again when they came out with cordless phones that did not have to be wired to the wall, and wireless computer networks that worked without LAN cables.  An old term for new technology, how interesting.

I suppose I could write about all the interesting and useful knowledge I have gained about how computer networks operate from reading a huge thick book I bought months ago about computer networks.  Well, I could write about it if I could remember much of what I read.  There is just too much information to remember without studying and using it every day.  Networks work on many different levels.  You plug them in and they work.  What’s to know?

I suppose I could go fictional and just post stories.  Fiction blogs are not going to be real popular, unless I was JK Rowling and writing my Harry Potter books online for people to read in real time and make suggestions on.  Why would I do that when I could write a book and sell it to people instead?  I have thought about the idea of making up fictional stuff and putting it in a blog entry.  I have a fictional blog on Livejournal, which nobody even looks at.  I know how popular fiction is.

If this were a professional blog people who hire me to write articles or pieces for them could give me some subject to write about.  There are pay per post blog sites that operate this way.  You write a post about some article or other that somebody is trying to sell.  Essentially you would be advertising.  My blog here does not get enough traffic to justify selling advertisements yet.  So for now, I am just typing away trying to think up random things to write about.  It’s an enjoyable way to pass the time.

I occasionally write up posts based on news stories or just things I find in doing web searches.  This is about as good a way as any to get information for a bit of writing.  I thought about writing something about cars.  Cars are popular.  Do I want to be an unpaid cyber-advertiser for the auto industry?  No, the unpaid thing is uncool.  I was reading a book last night called “The Well Fed Writer” about freelancing, and it seems like a lot of trouble to get involved in.  You have to drum up business.  You have to do all the work.  Then you have to try and collect your pay.  On top of everything you have to keep all the records.  You have to figure out all your taxes.  You need to keep track of all your hours.  That’s a lot of work.  With a blog you sit at your computer and type about anything that crosses your mind.  Your opinions do not have to be any good at all.  You can be a complete idiot and still keep a blog.

This is a very long entry.  If anyone reads this I hope you didn’t come here looking for ideas to write about, because I’m fresh out.  Pick up some random item off the floor and write about that.  It’s no wonder people write about teddy bears and greeting cards.  There’s a lot of stuff in this world that would be the perfect subject for any kind of an essay.  Nobody knows if it will be interesting to anyone.  Write whatever you want and if they like it, they will come.

Poetry is one of the original forms of literature.  The ancients wrote in verse because verse is easy to remember and writing was a skill few people had.  Songs, stories, tales of adventure were all composed in the form of poetry.  Today, anyone can write a poem and show it to the world.  All it takes is a little knowledge of the form and some practice.

Many people think a poem has to rhyme.  This is not true.  In fact, in this modern age, rhyming poems seem childish and simplistic.  In olden times a poem was composed in a certain meter or rhythm.  This is because many poems were sung as songs and had to flow with the music.  Today, few serious poems are written with rhyme or meter.  Yes, there are poets who compose sonnets and sestinas today, but they are in the minority.  Most poetry written today is in free verse.  The poet puts whatever form pleases him or her to a poem.

A poem is composed of lines and stanzas.  A line is just a phrase, sentence, or even a single word set off on the page as its own line of text.  You may punctuate lines or leave them unpunctuated. It all depends on how you want your poem to look.  When you get a few lines down on the page you might want to insert a blank line to set off a stanza.  Usually, modern poems are written as one long stanza.  You do not have to follow convention when you write poetry.  Make yourself familiar  with the style in which you plan to write by reading a lot of poetry.  Go to a library and read collections of poems and poetry journals.  Study the themes and subjects of poetry.  You will find that some poetry is hard to understand.  The poet may not say exactly what he or she means.  Poets are fond of using metaphors.  A metaphor is a word or phrase that signifies something else.  When we say “the flag” and mean “our country” the flag is a metaphor for the country.  It’s very simple in principle but can be confusing if you don’t know what the poet is trying to say.

It is good practice to read your poems out loud to see how they sound to the ear and how the words flow.  If a word sounds wrong or out of place, find another word that means the same thing.  A thesaurus might be helpful.  Always keep your theme or subject in mind when you write poetry.  You are trying to convey a feeling or sense to the reader or hearer of your poem.  Include lots of concrete imagery in your poems.  Show the reader what you are thinking about, do not tell them how to feel.  People like to figure things out for themselves.  This is part of the enjoyment of reading a poem.  If your poem is so confusing, random, and lacking in imagery that a reader has no idea what you are talking about it may be time to try again.  Many people who begin writing poems write them for themselves.  You have all the information you need to know what your poems mean, but another person would be lost if they read your poem.  You write poems for other people to read if you ever hope to be published.  Consider your reader and give them all the information they need to enjoy your work.

A good way to get material for a poem is just to take a notebook and a pen and go out for a walk somewhere.  Write down what you see.  Make up little stories about the people you see.  Try to describe things like the weather or the sky or a bridge over the river.  If you go to the mall describe how some person looks as they hurry to the different stores.  Describe how you feel as you wait in line for a movie.  There are many things to write poems about.  Use your imagination and write clearly and with many details.  You are creating something for your readers to experience.  Make sure you write about things a person would want to experience.  Many people write about how depressed they are or about their anxiety.  I do not read poems to feel depressed or afraid.  There is a place for negativity, but if this is all you write about you will have problems selling your work.

If you plan on becoming a poet as a career, forget it now.  You will starve to death if you try to support yourself writing poems.  The market for poetry is very small.  Less than a handful of people ever make any money from their poems.  This does not mean you should not write.  Take enjoyment from your work and try to give something back to the world.  Poetry is an observation of our planet that can give enjoyment to a person.  Take pride in your work as a poet and craft your poems with as much skill as you have, and you will write meaningful poetry.

You need three things to write a story.  You need characters.  One character is the main character, and he or she interacts with other characters.  You will need a scene or setting, which is where the story takes place.  The third thing you will need for a story is a plot, which is what happens in the story.

That is basically all there is to writing a story.  Sure, there are fine points like how do you present your characters and what kind of a world do they live in.  There are things like what themes will you present in your story and what images will you use to present your material.  All of these things will evolve from your writing as you go about fleshing out your story.  There are lots of books on how to write.  None of these will replace your own experience in writing the stories you want to tell.

Characters are what drive a story.  People are interested in finding out what other people do.  This is human nature.  You will need names for your characters.  Your characters should have distinctive personalities.  They may dress in a certain way.  They will have specific occupations and relationships to other characters.  The specific details are how you give a story life.  People are individuals and have unique traits.  Make your characters interesting and people will enjoy reading your story.

The setting of a story often defines the particular genre in which the story is placed.  Detective stories, crime stories, fantasy stories, science fiction stories all have their particular settings.  Make your setting interesting and colorful and you will gain the interest of your readers.  Be specific about features and places in your world.  Concrete details make for interesting literature.

There are many standard story plots listed in books.  If you are out of ideas go to the library and check out something like Master Plots.  Bring a pen and paper and write out an outline once you find an interesting plot.  Better yet, make up your own original plot.  Heroes saving damsels in distress is an old and overused plot.  Think of something different to make your story fresh.  Plot is underrated in academia as an element of stories, but you will find that most bestsellers are mostly plot.  The plot is what happens in a story.  If nothing happens in your story people will lose interest.

Sit down at your computer when your mind is fresh.  Open up your word processor application or whatever software you use to write.  Make an outline of plot.  Make a list of characters.  Describe a setting.  Read all this over and keep it in the back of your mind as you begin to write your story.  When you can’t think of what to write, look at where your plot is going.  Bring in a new character.  Describe an element of the setting.  Above all do not go on forever about one minor thing.  Give your reader lots of interesting bits and your story will be enjoyable and entertaining.  Never forget that it is conflict that defines a story.  Look for conflict in your story and dramatize this for your readers.  In the end, a story is nothing more than a lot of stuff that happens to some people somewhere, to paraphrase Homer Simpson.  Go over your story once it is written and get rid of anything that is not needed to move the story along.  Get in the habit of writing every day and soon you will have a lot of material to sell.