Just got asked the question. How do I Deal With Writer’s Block?

And then another question, “How Do I Know If My Personal Stories Are Boring?”

First of all no body’s stories are boring. You may just need to spice up your vocabulary a little. To get right to the heart of this post scroll down until you see. Emotions are always engaging topics and sensory descriptive words are always great communicators and read on.

But for those who are just plain stuck, try this practice:

Since my granddaughter was born I have had no trouble thinking of things I want to tell her when she grows up. Little things that I may not remember when she’s able to understand what I’m talking about, so I put them in emails that I email to myself daily or when the inspiration strikes.

I think it is the same with our blogging. If we put the emotions of our ideas in little draft files in our website posts and leave them alone while. Go back to them now and again to see if any of them have grown into full-fledged stories, then start writing.

We don’t have to post them until we are ready to, but it is good not to lose any of those little gems that might turn into valuable stories for our readers. If we put ourselves in the shoes of our customers or even non-customers, if we put ourselves in the shoes of other people who may want to experience something that we have to share this is what blogging is about. Sharing our experience so that others will come to trust us and follow our recommendations when they may need something.

All that that means is, we do have stories about ourselves to tell? We just have to trust the feelings around them, nurture those feelings then put them into words. Write the emotion packed part first. Then go back and build the structure of the story around the emotion that changed or affected you in some way. It would be great if the story was related to the products we are promoting, but they don’t have to. Everyone reads stories to find out a little more about themselves.

You may have an experience that will give them insight that they have never had before, or at the very least, confirm what they already knew and that can be just as powerful a realization as discovering something they didn’t know. So, don’t sell your life experience short.

You may want to have a few posts on your website that deal solely with your life experience.

One WA member put a permanent file on her website in the sidebar that was just for inspirational stories and reflections from her personal life. I thought that was so very charming and endeared me to her and to her site immediately. I go back there often to read her thoughts. I plan on doing that as well for my own site. Soon.

Like I said, if you can search the internet and find stories about your product or niche that engage, inform, entertain and give insight all the better. But if you can’t come up with personal experiences about your product or niche, then dazzle them with stories about yourself or stories that you like. Name it My Reflections, or My Story picks. Something that tells them this is set apart and may not be relevant to the product but just something you wanted to share.

Emotions are always engaging topics and sensory descriptive words are always great communicators. The internet is a very cerebral medium and people are hungry to find emotionally engaging content. If tactful and well written you can entertain your viewers for hours or days with your stories, anecdotes, in sights and humor.

Below are a few tips put together by a site called CopyHackers. They are really good recommendations for making your stories more memorable and compelling to your readers. Three of them are the following: Try out their suggestions and let me know what you think.

Try to spike your stories using these sensory image words:

1. Tactile Words
2. Aromatic Words
3. Motion Words

Studies show that words that engage our senses and engage those parts of our brain outside of those usual language processing areas are memorable and more experiencial to our readers. In using them we are more fully engaging the entire mind of our reader. They are fun to erite and to read.

Tactile Words

Studies show that people respond more to a phrase like tired eyes than they do to unfocused eyes. Unfocused eyes expresses one state of being. They are unfocused. That’s it. Whereas tired eyes expresses an experience. Everyone has experienced tiredness and everyone knows what it is to have eyes that are blurry, and eyelids that are heavy and a head that pounds when they try to focus their eyes on something.

Unfocused is not tactile in the same way that tired is and it is not unusual either.

Aromatic Words

A 2006 study asked participants to read words with a strong odor association. As they read these words, their brains were scanned by an MRI. When they looked at the words perfume and coffee their primary olfactory cortex lit up the part of their brain that the rest of the copy just didn’t.

Motion Words

Words describing movement do something similar too. So, when you read the sentence. people jumped for joy, the motor cortex which controls our movements becomes engaged.

So, to be clear, this is science. They study this. This is a fact you can take to your CEO if somebody doesn’t believe you.

So, if you want your readers to respond to your words, use words that stimulate parts of their brain not normally stimulated by copy.

Bring that picture to life with words that suggest texture, sense or movement.

Here is another thought about using unusual words to communicate a tactile experience.

So what would you do with a paragraph like this?

‘The clean minimalist drag and drop editor never gets in your way so you can create the surveys you want faster and with far less frustration than ever before.’

You might write something more tactile and motion rich like this:

‘Drop questions into place to craft sharpedged surveys faster and with far less frustration than ever before.’ 

With that copy you kicked off by using movement words. ‘Drop questions into place.’

You also used a very tactile word, ‘sharp-edged surveys.’ Now, what are sharp-edged surveys? Who actually knows? But it’s tactile. It makes you think of thin paper or razors or sharp accusations, a thing worthy of paying attention to.

Should you care that ‘sharp edged surveys’ might not actually mean something? I personally wouldn’t….

I used to love the T.V. show the West Wing which was written by Aaron Sorkin. In one episode the screewriter uses the phrase, ‘The WatchWord of All Mankind” in one of his speeches. And the character’s peer, Toby, says, “the watchword of all mankind, I don’t even know what that means.” Will replys, “Don’t worry, neither will anyone else.”

What Is Your WatchWord of All Mankind?

Now that’s a bit of writer’s arrogance, but it speaks to a key lesson. Sometimes you can play with language if you do it intentionally and sparsely. Let yourself say something different sometimes.

That word makes me think of what is most important to all of mankind. It gets me out of my little theater of emergencies and makes me think of the larger picture in a more profound and deeper way. A way in which language can and does really help culture to evolve. How many impactful new words do you have up your sleeve?

Always remember that a good portion of your blog must be good solid facts about your product, if you are promoting something in the same post as the story you are writing, but draw them in with your stories and you will have a customer for life.

Another way to get out of the slump of writer’s block is to read about threads that other people are talking about in blogs, forums and Q and As. For example:

Quora, a question and answer forum on just about any topic you can imagine. It is always difficult for me to tear myself away once I start reading the quality contributions there.

Yahoo, Bing, Google all have Q and A forums as well.

Even though you may already have your niche ideas, here’s another list of ideas you can gain inspiration from for your posts. It doesn’t always have to be about selling something. – 112 Blog Ideas to use for your new blog.

The more you research your product, idea or topic, the more the ideas will come.

I wrote about more ways to research your product. Visit my blog at

http://writingqualitycontent.com

contact me at beth@writingqualitycontent.com

Leave a comment below

Join my on-line community and promote your own passion for pay website

All the best

Beth

Today I’m going to talk a little about the difference between advertisements and ad copy.

There are three ways you can know if you are a great writer.

Can you make someone cry?

Can you make someone laugh?

If you can do either of these you are a great writer.

Can you make someone take action to solve their problem?

 If you can do this in addition to making someone cry or making them laugh, then you have the formula for winning over your readers and making them customers for life.

Advertisements

Have you ever seen that advertisement on T.V. that shows a contestant waiting by the phone to see if he will be called to answer the question that will win him lots of money? He is sitting there eating a big piece of chocolate cake waiting for the phone to ring.

It rings, and as the MC says, “You are the lucky contestant to have been chosen among thousands to answer the following question. If you do answer it correctly you’ll win $10,000. The question is, “Who killed Alexander Hamilton?”

Our contestant’s excitement rises to a feverish pitch as he realizes that he just finished reading a Biography of the famed Revolutionary War hero, Founding Father and Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton and he knows exactly who killed him. And so he speaks into the phone with all confidence and joy his little heart has mustered and says, ‘Awon Buwaa.’ The MC says, I’m sorry would you say that again?” He says again with his mouth full of chocolate cake, ‘Awon Buwa.’

The MC says, I’m sorry, I can’t be sure, but that sounds like a wrong answer, we’ll have to go to another contestant and hangs up. The camera moves in on a very shocked, frustrated and extremely disappointed contestant with chocolate frosting covering his mouth and chin and the announcer’s voice on the T.V says,

“got milk?”

Advertisements Make You Aware of A Product – They Inform You About What They Are Offering You

This story is an example of an advertisement. Its purpose is to make you aware, albeit in a very shocking and funny way, that you may or may not have any milk with you now and will you have any when next you may need it? It is making you wonder whether-or-not you are aware of whether-or-not you have any milk in your fridge. Nowhere in this ad does anyone ask you to go put your shoes on, get in the car, drive down to the store and buy a bottle of milk. Nowhere here is there a request for a direct response from the reader.

Ad Copy – Direct Response Requested

Now follow this link: They Laughed When I Sat Down To Play….

I have chosen this ad, though old, because it is considered the breakthrough Direct Response Ad for all of marketing. Marketing from the day this ad was released has never been the same. It set the tone for direct response advertising from day one, is considered an icon of the Direct Response Marketing community and its author John Caples is considered a guru of the genre.

Take your time and read through this ad and see if you can pick out those places in it, from the very beginning that are engaging you as the reader. Whether or not you were interested at the moment you first saw the ad in learning to play an instrument, chances are once you started reading, you got hooked and sold into learning to play.

Where are those places that hooked you as a reader? Where were you engaged by them?

Your choices may be different from mine, but here are a few that I chose:

A. The story itself of impressing and surprising your friends and family is extremely engaging.

What Are You Connecting With In Your Customer?

Who doesn’t want to impress friends and family with our accomplishments? 

We deserve to have pride in ourselves and fun with our friends and family.

1. You are telling them that they are capable of learning a new skill.
2. You are telling them that they deserve to show off the fruits of their years of learning how to learn.
3. You are telling them that they can finally show their friends and family with the gift of music how much they love them.

B. How I learned to play without a teacher.   

What are you connecting to in your customer?

Their accomplishments and capabilities.

1. You are connecting with the busy-ness of your customer. The program is structured to require no time- consuming and laborious practice sessions.
   • You are telling them that they are being responsible to others in their lives and so they are very busy people.
2. You are telling them that you see them as disciplined and organized enough to create and schedule what practice time will be required of them without a teacher.
   • You are telling them that they are being responsible to themselves in practicing the discipline and organization they need to get things done for themselves and those they are responsible for.
3. You are telling them that your product is so complete, you will not need to pay a teacher week after week to tell you what you already can see for yourself. Or you are telling them that your product is so complete that it contains everything that you would need to know to play like a champ, even if it is instruction on how to find what you are looking for in your piano learning enterprise.
   • You are telling them that they are capable and talented enough to teach themselves

C. Play Any Instrument

What are you are connecting to in your customer?

That part of them that wants to be an artist.

The mystique around the playing of an instrument, any instrument is dispelled with the list of instruments that the reader can be taught to play. The reader is put into the same category as some of the greatest musicians and artists of the reader’s time. They don’t kid themselves that they will be as accomplished as the greats, or will they? What matters is that the reader is made of the same stuff as the great musical achievers of his day.

D. Send For Our Free Booklet and Demonstration Lesson

What are you connecting to in your customer?

That part of them that wants value for their money. 

Value = Quality + Cost

1. The cost is minimal. At the very least it costs nothing or very little to try the program to see if you are happy with what you can learn. No further commitment or investment is necessary.
   • You see them as an individual with circumstances completely different from everyone else reading this ad and you are taking those circumstances into consideration by giving them a no to low cost, no further obligation trial of the program.
2. Package arrived in a timely manner. So many trial run offers seem to be scams today as the trial run period begins the day you purchase the product instead of the day you receive it.  An unscrupulous seller can wait until the last few days of the trial period to even send the program or product out to you so that you have no time to try it out before you have to purchase the product full-price.
   • You are acknowledging and respecting their tendency to be skeptical of the quality of anything that they are putting their hard earned money out to buy.
3. It was everything and more that it claimed to be.
   • You respect them enough that you don’t want them to be lied to. This isn’t just too good to be true. They can trust this company that they provide what they say they will.

E. Sign and Send the Convenient Coupon Now!

What are you connecting to in your customer? 

The ease of making that decision that could change their lives!

1. Give the reader a command.
   • Tell them exactly what to do.
     1. Fill out the coupon completely and send it in.
     2. You’d give them a self-addressed, stamped envelope if you could.
2. Make them act by saying that the offer is limited.
   • Oddly enough, this still works. Probably because even though most offers are not time sensitive, some are and the reader is never really certain which are and which aren’t and so it is an incentive for them to act in a timely manner.
3. Everything supplied when needed cash or credit
   • Let them know the company has everything they need and will supply it for them when they need it.
   • Let them know when there will be an additional charge up front.
     1. That way they will know when something is really free.
4. Name of School and Address
   • name of offer re-iterated, so they are sure at every step what they are purchasing.
     1. Eliminate as much confusion during the action step as possible.
     2. Spell it out like you were talking to children.
     3. Every detail is important because they are hearing this for the first time and they want to be sure they know what they are signing up for.
5. What is requested of you?
   1. course and instrument you are interested in
   2. your name and address
   3. timely response

So, AdCopy or Direct Response Marketing, on the other hand, is intended to get your reader to take immediate action at your suggestion or recommendation.

1. Draw your reader in with a favorite story that captivates. It doesn’t even have to be a story that you yourself experienced.
   • You can say that this is a story about, your product or info.
   • Just make sure that the story is relevant to what you are promoting.
2. Tell all the good and bad things you can about your product or information, be honest.
3. Give your customer as much free value as you can that explains more about the product, or free trial of the product, free instruction or tutorials concerning the product.
   • Make the information so easy to access that they don’t have any time or reason to refuse or back out of the offer.
   • Don’t make your offer complicated to access.
4. Then give them an offer that is difficult for them to refuse in conjunction with this free value you are giving them.
5. Direct them to send that free info as soon as possible.

Once you have their contact information, you are on your way to developing a life-long customer relationship with this person who trusted you enough to download or order your offer.

If you can keep this in mind as you write your ad copy you will soon be writing content that engages and gets a direct response from many who read it.

Please stay tuned and come back for more posts about story writing, ad copy writing and engaging content.

Please leave a comment below.

Learn more about writing quality content at my website www.writingqualitycontent.com

Join our COMMUNITY We give first-rate feedback and answers to any of your questions about setting up your website, building it and getting it ranked on google, bing, and yahoo.

See you soon,

Beth Haran

Beth@writingqualitycontent.com

Some Much Needed Perspective On Hosting

Hosting is cheap…RIGHT?

Well, yeah, there is definitely some CHEAP hosting plans out there. You see $3.96 hosting, $5 hosting, even $10 hosting. These are low quality hosting services offered by the likes of GoDaddy, HostGator or Webs.com and yes, they are cheap…but you get what you pay for.

And these hosts are stuffing you on a server with 1,000’s of other domains, domains which are slowing your site down because they are not monitored and domains that leave huge security holes that leave you vulnerable to hacks, attacks, and data integrity issues.

These are platforms that ARE NOT specific to WordPress nor are they a good idea to host your WordPress website on.

We have never done “cheap” here at Wealthy Affiliate, and what you are getting here with your Premium membership is sheer quality.

Our Hosting is State of the Art, High Quality, and is Setting Industry Standards.

We have never compromised quality for volume. We could offer a low-quality service like shared hosts are offering, but we simply are not in the business of offering anything but what we KNOW to be the utmost quality.

To compare a $60-$100 per year hosting plan at HostGator or GoDaddy to that offered here at WA, is like comparing apples to oranges, or budget, low quality and highly insecure …to high quality, high performance, fully supported and maintained, and highly secure hosting (that you get here at WA).

There are companies that are offering a similar host quality that we are offering here to Premium members of Wealthy Affiliate and I think you are going to be surprised as to how much a service like this really costs.

Some “Comparable” Hosting Plans in the Industry

The only comparable plan I could find in terms of quality (albeit lower than that offered to you at WA), is GoDaddy’s WordPress hosting WPengine hosting.

How much are they in comparison (for a comparable plan)?

GoDaddy is $76.99 per MONTH. (see details here)
WPEngine is $249.00 per MONTH (see details here)

This is anywhere from 3 times, the 9 times more expensive the price you pay for your entire membership here at WA (based on the yearly membership here).

And these hosts don’t include:

• A highly optimized and simplified hosting platform
• The ability to MOVE websites from one domain to another
• The Ability to fire up FREE Websites on demand
• Full Redundancy (100% backed-up to the minute)
• The latest and greatest hosting technology (your websites are always hosted on the highest powered servers available)
• Automated recovery processes
• Personal website monitoring and maintenance
• Removal of “rogue” plugins and themes
• Comment spam management and behavioral assessment (so you don’t even get the spam in the first place)
• Website integrity updates the continually improve how your WordPress sites function, based on the latest version of WP

So not only are the true industry comparisons a minimum of 3 times the cost, they are also inferior to the service level that you can come to expect here at WA with the hosting inside your Premium membership.

But This is Just the Quality of Hosting You Get Here..

With those plans you are not getting everything else that is offered to you here.

1. The Community and the Live Help
2. Access to Industry Experts
3. Personal Access to the Owners
4. World Class Training (1,000’s of resources)
5. Keyword Research Tools
6. Weekly Live Video Classes
7. Unlimited Access to our Website Builder
8. One of the Most Lucrative Affiliate Programs in the World
9. Ambassadorship Program (Ability to Pay it Forward)
10. Incentive Programs
11. Business Productivity Tools (Rapid Writer, Link Tracking, KW Lists)
12. Access to ALL Future Updates

And this is all included in your membership. And this is ALL you need to create and grow a business. So when you put a “hosting package” alongside a business building and education platform like WA, there is simply no comparison.

And a Little Perspective…

I just wanted to give everyone a bit of perspective on what you are getting here at WA. You are getting a much higher quality service, for a lower price…and this is just talking about the hosting aspect. For a similar host only, you would be looking at minimum of $75 per month!

Hosting is not just hosting and we can assure you that you are getting the highest quality hosting platform here at WA.

With a Premium membership here at WA, you can be assured that you have access to a business building platform that you can run a business off of, grow a business as a result of, and rest easy at night knowing that you are getting the absolute best service in the world and we will continue to push this beyond what it is today.

With each day that passes, your service and your experience here within WA is only going to get amplified in a very, very good way!

Please leave a comment below

email me at beth@writingqualitycontent.com

Visit my website www.writingqualitycontent.com

All the best

Beth

Wealthy Affiliate – Network Marketing Career Support

If you have ever wanted to start writing, or start doing anything that will get your message out to the world and wanted the support from others just like you who were just getting started and from experts who have been in the business of getting information to those looking for it for a very long time, you deserve to treat yourself to the most revolutionary place on the internet.

I have been joining and paying a lot of money over the years to people and programs who claimed they could help me get my internet website up and running and monetized to boot if that was what I wanted.

I was interested. I wanted to explore this world via the internet because I am a curious person and had the time. I having been searching for the right place to explore the world of the internet on and off for over 15 years.

Recently I found Wealthy Affiliate. I have learned more from Wealthy Affiliate in 1 1/2 months than I have learned playing with the internet over the past 15 years. It’s as simple as that.

It wasn’t until I found Wealthy Affiliates that all of my dreams of an internet adventure have finally come true.

From knowing practically nothing to having in one month:

1. Learned about internet marketing, what it is, what it does, that is possible for me to doit,
2. Learned how to use keywords to unlock my creativity in researching a niche to share my passions in,
3. Have chosen an appropriate niche to share with the world,
4. Researched keywords to help me decide on the name for my niche,
5. Set up my niche website in WordPress,
6. Have gotten to know which plugins to use and how to install them,
7. Have written over 12 posts for my niche,
8. Have drafted and researched over 100 more possible ideas for posts,
9. Had people read and comment on my posts,
10. Have had the opportunity to read other people’s posts and comment on them,
11. Have been given knowledge of how to follow the rankings of my posts on Google,
12. Have posted my posts and articles on Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest,
13. Have been given a ranking within my Wealthy Affiliate Community based on the criteria that helps people get ranked high on Google,
14. Have had the emotional support and questions answered that I have needed to keep going when I got stuck.

I have come a long way and am looking forward:

• to learning a lot more about the internet and how it works,
• to learning a lot more about the world and how I can participate in the marketplace it supports,
• to meeting a lot more interesting people along the way,
• to reading about a lot more personal passions,
• to finally getting rid of that gnawing feeling that this is “just too good to be true”
• and really beginning to believe that Wealthy Affiliates will be with me through the entire learning process all the way to my success.

Leave me  a comment about this post below

Send me an email at beth@writingqualitycontent.com

Visit my website at www.writingqualitycontent.com

Most of all, join me at Wealthy Affiliates for an adventure of a lifetime.

All the best.

Beth

I decided to turn one of my comments into a post. Mainly because the answer was getting a little too long for a comment and also, I thought that these thoughts and the question itself might help others with the same question.

So the question was:

I really have a problem with writing content. I know that it is a major factor for the success of a website. I try to write everyday because I need to improve my writing skills. I agree with you that if you really want to develop you have to do it consistently. My only problem now is writing quality content. I find it exhausting because i think that my articles are not that good. Do you have any suggestion?

I agree that writing quality content, in the beginning, is exhausting. I think that is because we are trying to figure out how to express the sincerity we feel about what we are trying to share with others. A wise woman once told me that there are two kinds of work, physical labor, and emotional work. It is very difficult to freely give away our emotional point of view. Even if our point of view is only about a product. I think that most of us care about how our suggestions will affect those we give them too. We want to be helpful. We don’t want to cause other people problems.

The best way to deal with that sometime unconscious concern is to become a very good researcher of our product or information. Find out everything we can about what we are promoting, all the positive points and all the possible pitfalls as well. This thorough research can help free us to feel good that what you are promoting is quality stuff. I wrote a post about research. Please go visit that post at How To Research For Articles – The Psychology of Not Getting Stuck and see if the info helps.

In sharing our point of view (even if it is about a product), we are sharing a vulnerable part of ourselves and I think it is perceived by our customers as honest. I think we are all trying to be honest and sincere about our experience and why it is important enough for us to share it with others. When we open up our feelings, even about a product, to strangers I think more than not we are perceived as being sincere and honest and vulnerable. I think that people are more willing to trust the view of a vulnerable, honest opinion than the view of a sales pitcher who has learned how to protect his feelings with canned robotic words.

Everyone is trying to connect and be connected to. If you have a point of view or story to tell that is from your heart, people may be more inclined to trust what you have to say about other things.

I think that the more you do your research about your product and really try to give your customers quality products, the better you will feel about sharing more emotionally based stories and experiences about other parts of your life as you build out your blog.

Could you share a funny story about the product you are promoting? Everyone loves to laugh or even just giggle. Anecdotes, even about products are fun. Anecdotes and stories that are not your own are just as good. Read about other people’s experiences with the products. As long as you clarify that the experience is not your own, I think people will appreciate it. I really envy those people who have a story or anecdote for every occasion. They can pull a story out of a hat. That is something I really want to work on for myself.

Anything that helps us share in another world even for just a minute can be like a little vacation. Get away from thinking that your writing is being judged harshly. Believe me, it isn’t. And even if someone or two decide they want to judge your writing for some reason. So what. There are more people wanting to root for your sincerity and vulnerability than those who want to judge it.

As you go through Wealthy Affiliates you will be given an opportunity to read a lot of blogs. As you read through them be honest about how their writing affects you personally. Bookmark those sites that you like and would like to return to and learn more from, even if, or should I say especially if it is the writing that you like.

So, yes. Emotional truth can be exhausting. Try a little at a time. Post your stories on WA for comments and know that the comments you are getting from people are for real. Hopefully, those comments will give you the encouragement to keep researching for quality and opening up.

Visit my post – What Do People Want – Customer Motivation

Let me know what you think

Others have told me that some of my other posts have been helpful in motivating them in getting started with their content writing.

Please leave a comment below.

Visit my website at www.writingqualitycontent.com

or email me at beth@writingqualitycontent.com

Thanks for visiting my post and all the best.

Beth

I just finished a post entitled How to Research for Articles – Ezines, Blogs, Diaries, Anything Else? – You might want to read what I wrote about Diaries. It might help with those creative juices.

As I read many blogs and posts in order to find ideas for my own posts on Writing Quality Content for your blog, I notice that:

1) The subject matter and knowledge of subject matter  of most websites is “outstanding.” People know their stuff. They know what they are passionate about. They seem to really love what they are doing and that is “attractive.” However,

2) when it comes to ‘content’ as differentiated from subject matter, 4 out of every 5 posts I read have some very obvious and embarrassing grammatical, spelling, context or copy write errors.

If we want our simple but fantastic subject matter to be eventually reviewed and perhaps posted by a well-known and influential on-line magazines within our niches, we need to be as grammatically correct and content appropriate as possible.

I have been using Grammarly since day one of my writing of my posts. I have a bachelor’s degree and some post-grad classes, have been writing all my life and still I am surprised at all the grammatical, sentence structure and spelling mistakes that Grammarly picks up in my writing. Sometimes I think that brilliant people like us think faster than we write and then move on to our next task before proofreading what we have written.

Well, Grammarly takes care of our proofreading for us by checking our English for correct grammar, sentence structure, spelling, punctuation and more.

I was able to put the basic Grammarly App on my Chrome and Firefox browsers for free. If I was using Safari browser, I would be able to put Grammarly on it as well. I have been using the free version for months now and it works very, very well, however, I am going to upgrade in order to take advantage of all the help they give in cleaning up and making my posts article ready quality.

This sounds like a real ad pitch and frankly it is.

I feel like a real ‘Pro’ when using Grammarly. Just one less thing to have to worry about with my on-line content.

You will still have to provide the magical ‘subject matter.’ But I really urge and encourage everyone to put Grammarly upgraded on all of your web browsers.

Here is an excerpt from a post by Meg Dowell
Meg is the managing editor at College Lifestyles magazine, a guest contributor with Lifehack and SuccessStory.com and a guest blogger for Food & Nutrition Magazine. She is an eight-time NaNoWriMo winner and has also written for Teen Ink and USA TODAY College. Follow Meg on Twitter.

I discovered something soul-crushing: two websites whose copywriters and content editors allowed the use of “towards” on their web pages.

These were semi-credible organizations, not blogs or sketchy dot coms. I’m still in a state of shock that I came across not one, but two of these grammatical crimes in a row. Do you think I used anything I found on those pages for my article, or even finished reading them through? If you guessed no, you’re my new favorite person.

You might have great ideas, and the potential to make people really listen to what you have to say. If your writing shocks people the way these writers shocked me—and “shock” here is not used in a positive light, either—you’re not going to get very far. Here’s what you might be missing in your own online work, and you can do, as a writer, to make sure you’re not even unintentionally ruining your own credibility.

Infuriating the Internet’s Grammar Enforcement Squad
If you’ve been writing for a while—and hopefully, if you’re posting online, you have—you’re no stranger to basic grammar and style laws. Avoid starting sentences with because. Set an excellent example, not a awful one. However, based on my recent findings, it’s clear some rules are less commonly followed in the general online community, and in all honesty, you’re going to draw the wrong kind of attention from editors and the like if you’re not careful.

I can’t speak for all editors, but when I’m doing basic research and stumble upon an article or web page with obvious (to me) grammar mistakes, I hit the back button. I stop reading. This is neither good for you nor the publication, website or organization you’re writing for. Know the audience you are writing for and what style you should be following, then follow it. (Side note: AP Stylebook says, “toward, forward, afterward”).

Comments
6 Responses to “Three Ways You’re Sabotaging Your Credibility as a Writer (and How to Fix Them)”
creativityinthebox says:
March 23, 2015 at 7:39 AM
Your ‘towards’ using writers could just be English (or other British). I have a similar reaction towards ‘toward’.

Reply
Novelty Revisions says:
March 23, 2015 at 11:55 AM
I hadn’t thought about the possible difference in dialect. Unfortunately I’m more familiar with AP Style than any other style (I hope to expand my horizons, of course) and am just used to many of its rules. It’s not “wrong” – just something to get used to I suppose. It was mainly the fact that I stumbled upon it written that way twice in a row that startled me!

Reply
creativityinthebox says:
March 23, 2015 at 12:35 PM
American English is so prevalent that I’m probably more used to seeing alternatives than you are. There are some Americanisms that drive me up the wall (‘I could care less’ is one that will have me immediately close the tab for fear of starting an argument), but for the most part I hardly notice them. It’s like being bilingual.

Novelty Revisions says:
March 23, 2015 at 1:03 PM
You must mean the argument that it’s “could care less” when the proper phrase is of course “couldn’t care less,” as in, “They could not care any less about the claims of the grammatically ignorant.” Segue – contractions have ruined English regardless of the dialect. I wish we did not use them. I am trying to train myself not to write them so often for reasons similar to the above.

Or, to summarize: I agree with you. 🙂

creativityinthebox says:
March 23, 2015 at 1:15 PM
It depends on what I’m writing. I’d never use contractions in academic writing, but in fiction they sound unnatural and clunky, unless you’re going for an archaic feel. Every function has its form, as it were.

Trackbacks
Check out what others are saying…
Three Reasons Creative Writers Should Try Writing Nonfiction | Novelty Revisions says:
March 27, 2015 at 6:19 PM
[…] you enough, it’s not good research. When writing nonfiction, research is essential to the credibility and clarity of your piece. Before writing an article or essay, you’d better know the topic […]

Hope this review of the importance of grammar in content writing has helped. I really encourage you to try Grammarly. You won’t be sorry.  And if you are looking for a forum and community to test out those posts and articles you do write with. There is none better than Wealthy Affiliates. Even if you don’t go public with your work. You will get the best feedback for $47 a month anywhere on the Internet.

It costs $7 for the first week. The $19 for the rest of the month. Then $47 for every month thereafter. If you want you can pay $29 a month if you pay for an entire year at once

Even though I absolutely  love to read, I have not yet attained the skill of speed reading and so know my limitations. I can’t possibly read and review all the books and articles I will want to recommend to you in my posts. Even though I would very much like to. And you can’t do that either, with your reviews. So what I’m doing is putting into practice those suggestions I made in my post on Scam or Legit Reviews – On Product Research For Quality Content. I’m going to do some research.