Don’t waste time warming up when writing for online audiences. Get started straight away.

Readers are busy. They scan text looking for meaning and they want it fast. Other writing competes for their attention and it is only a click away.

Your first paragraph should summarise the entire story in less than 40 words. A 30-word intro is better. And make sure those words aren’t all in one sentence.

Don’t overload the first paragraph with too many facts. Save details for later.

Move straight to the action. Passive first sentences send readers fleeing for the exit.

Online, opening words are often a teaser to lure readers. If Google indexed your story, the first 150 characters become the descriptive text telling people what to expect when they click the link.

If you struggle to write short, snappy first paragraphs, imagine you are writing an old-style tweet. When Twitter still had its 140-character limit that was excellent training for writing introductions.

One of the great things about Micro.Blog is you can use it for quick social-media style thoughts or you can write a more expansive blog post.

Good blog posts communicate ideas and information. Do it with crisp, unambiguous writing.

There’s nothing wrong with flowery writing. Just leave it for poetry, song lyrics and literary fiction.

Here are seven steps to help you turn out snappy blog posts that’ll have readers coming back for more:

1. Get straight to the point. Set out your store in the opening paragraph. Tell readers what the rest of the story will be about. If you’ve got one, make the first paragraph your opening argument.

2. Prove it. Follow your opening paragraph by building on the first idea or argument. Provide back-up information to explain or support the first paragraph. Tell readers why you said what you did in that first paragraph.

3. Make extra points in descending order of importance. Readers can drop out at any point. Make sure they get the best points early while you still have their attention.

4. Use plenty of full stops and line breaks. Short sentences make your copy dynamic and fast-moving. Short paragraphs make text easier to read. This is more important online. As a bonus, tight copy helps you articulate your ideas.

5. Murder your darlings. If you think you’ve written something clever, chances are you haven’t. Hit the delete key and move on. Don’t use favourite obscure words or complicated metaphors. Anything that sounds like poetry needs cutting, unless you are writing poetry.

6. Get on, get off, don’t hang around. And don’t outstay your welcome. Don’t feel the need for a long wrap-up. Make your last point, summarise if it helps, then stop writing.

7. Check before hitting the send button. Read through your post, spell-check, look for poor grammar, weed out the needless words, make sure the text is understandable. I sometimes walk away from the screen and do something else before returning for one last read. The distance helps.

You may call it a blog post, article or something else. A journalist would call it a story. Here’s how to write a good one.

Start your story by telling the reader what it is about. You do this briefly in the headline. Then again in the introduction or intro, which is a stop press paragraph.

Ask yourself:

• What is this story about,
• what information am I trying to get across and..
• what points must I make to do this?

Sum up the story in your mind in one simple sentence. This is your intro.

Its job is to tell the reader what the article is about and draw the reader in. As a rule, readers prefer brief intros.

Write so a reader who only gets as far as your intro still has a basic grasp of your story.

Newspapers teach journalists to start with a single sentence of between 15 and 21 words. This is what you should aim for, although at times you’ll need to use more words.

As an aside, proper nouns made up of multiple words only count as a single word when you’re calculating the ideal intro length.

You can have one sentence in your first paragraph or two or three. Either way keep it short and crisp.

Next comes the how — how did it happen or, more usually in your case, what happens next?

This is background information or explanation.

After the explanation comes amplification. You amplify the point or points following on from the intro.

Make these points one by one and in descending order of importance.

Last, after making all the main points, tie up any loose ends — ie., add any extra or background information deemed necessary but of lesser importance.

Elmore Leonard wrote this as the last of his ten rules of writing.

If it sounds like writing, rewrite it

Leonard is an author. A first-rate author who writes fast-paced novels with great dialogue and plenty of action.

While Leonard is an artist, his advice applies to journalists and anyone else who writes for a living.

What he means is make sure your writing doesn’t sound like an undergraduate essay or a high school homework.

There is a useful post at the Columbia Journalism Review chewing over the difference between words like electric and electrical or historic and historical.

Years ago, when training journalists, I would joke that Americans use more commas than British journalists because they are rich and can afford the extra ink. The same applies to journalists in Ireland, Australia or New Zealand.

You would often find long, comma-packed sentences in American newspapers. They don’t make for easy reading.

It’s better to write using plenty of full stops instead — periods if you’re American — and go sparing on the comma.

Keeping track of who does what to whom is hard in long, comma-laden sentences. Breaking sentences into smaller units of meaning makes writing easier to follow.

Only use commas where they aid understanding.

Writers often underrate the comma’s use as an aid to sense.

Some Americans put commas between all clauses and sub-clauses. Som grammar checking software tells you to do the same.

British-trained writers avoid them between short clauses at the start of sentences.

Americans also use commas before and at the end of a list of items. This is sometimes called the Oxford comma. As the name suggests, this is an not exclusively American habit.

Argument in favour of the Oxford comma seems to be gaining ground in some circles. That’s partly because writers who favour the Oxford comma have trained us to read prose the way we might read a formal logic argument.

Some experts say Americans are moving towards British patterns and commas are now less common on both sides of the Atlantic. Let’s hope so.

One last point. Neither approach is right or wrong. How one uses commas and full stops is a matter of editorial style, not grammar. The important thing about style is to be consistent.

Quotes are important in journalism and reporting because they tell readers the information in question wasn’t made up by a reporter, but is someone’s account or opinion.

Not all quotes are equal. The best come directly from an interviewee’s speech and are faithfully reproduced. In electronic media these are obvious – you see or hear the person in question saying their own words.

With written media, quotes can be either direct or indirect.

Direct quotes

Direct quotes are written inside speech marks and are more or less exactly the interviewee’s words.

I say “more or less exactly” because many journalists, myself included, tidy up, taking out the hesitations, the ums and the ahs. This is perfectly OK. What isn’t acceptable is putting words in someone’s mouth – words they didn’t use.

It would be normal to correct the grammar up to a point.

We often edit – often the reader only sees part of an interview. It wouldn’t be practical to include every word.

Indirect quotes

Journalists use indirect quotes to simplify and summarise an interviewee’s words, they improve readability.

Most quotes you see in written media come from interviews. Some come from prepared statements.

Organisations use prepared statements to control their message rather than answering pesky questions from nosey journalists whose job is to extract the truth not parrot propaganda.

Robotic speech patterns

Prepared statements generally don’t read like human speech. For some reason people think robotic English makes them sound more sincere or knowledgeable. Often the reverse is true.

Journalists don’t always make it clear when they repeat a prepared statement. This isn’t dishonesty. It happens because constantly telling readers where information comes from all the time quickly gets boring. We come from a tradition where the column inches allocated to a story was limited. And we still work in a market where readers lose patience with too much detail.

On the other hand, journalists shouldn’t pull the wool over reader’s eyes.

I tell my readers when a quote is from a statement when I’m writing a news story or feature, but not if I’m writing a two paragraph snippet. Most of the time I also tell readers if a quote is from an emailed response – which may have been written by committee or a social media post.

There’s a fine line between full disclosure and boring readers. But if the story is controversial or important, it is best to take the risk and be candid.

Your job as a writer is to get your message across clearly and quickly.

One way you can sabotage communication is by laying traps for readers. Traps that halt a reader’s natural flow as their eye scans over text.

Punctuation – as the name suggests – stops flow. This is why I leave out optional commas.

You can also slow down a reader’s flow when you use capital letters incorrectly. For the same reason you should never write a word entirely in capitals.

Companies that insist their names are spelled out in capitals only do this because they want to halt the reader’s flow and make them take notice. You do not have to indulge them. It’s another story if they are paying you to write marketing copy.

Likewise I don’t use the ‘&’ symbol – instead I always write ‘and’. The exception to this rule is when the ‘&’ forms part of a company’s name.

The same applies to ‘+’.

It is also better to write out percent in full than use %. Although some newspapers, including one where I work, insists on using the symbol.

Never resort to phone text-style language in anything written for a wider audience. It isn’t funny, clever or useful.

Avoid jargon if you can. Sometimes you have no choice.

It makes your writing difficult to understand and puts readers off. Jargon confuses readers and in many cases jargon is ambiguous – always a sign of poor communication. It puts a barrier between you and your readers.

This is especially hard if you interview someone who talks in jargon and mangement cliches. You have a duty to report their words accurately, but you also have a duty not to bombard readers with gobbledegook.

Where you can, turn quotes into indirect speech and simply drop the jargon term. Use easily understood descriptive words and phrases instead.

When you can’t avoid a jargon term give your reader a short definition in plain English.

If possible add an example to illustrate the definition.

I had to write about management when the term ‘participative management’ came up as unavoidable jargon.

I explained this as:

Participative management, a way of running things where the workers take part in decision-making.

It would have been so much better if the interviewee said that in the first place.

The post is ancient, but Erin Brenner wonders “Does spelling still matter?”

It does. It matters a lot.

Some people think worrying about spelling and grammar is anal and backward. They are wrong.

There are two reasons why spelling and grammar are important and will remain important for as long as people still read printed words:

First: Well-written, properly-spelt, grammatically-correct English is unambiguous.

Poorly written English is open to misinterpretation.

If being understood is important, then worry about spelling and grammar.

Second: Well-written text flows, it’s a pleasure to read. It sends readers a message about your professionalism and wisdom. It is credible. People want to read more of it.

Poorly written English jerks around, it causes readers to stumble. They may not realise why this sets off alarm bells in their heads, but it does. They won’t look for follow-up reading.

Too much poor English and they’ll question the message. This may not happen on a conscious level. It may not happen with all readers. It will happen enough for it to matter. So yes, spelling still matters.

Use capital letters for proper nouns. Avoid them for common nouns.

Proper nouns are the names of things. So use capitals for the names of people, places, months, days of the week, companies and so on. Don’t use capitals for common nouns.

People run into difficulty with capitals because there’s a temptation to use them for important words. In business writing people often use capitals as a way of avoiding offending someone or something by implying he or it isn’t important.

Another difficulty is with titles. Newspapers typically use a capital letter when the title comes directly before a person’s name but not otherwise.

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key is correct, but it would be the prime minister’s desk.

For more on this see Narcissistic capitals.

In his book Newsman’s English British newspaper editor Harold Evans says;

“Avoid using them unnecessarily. The Parks Committee, but subsequently the committee. The South West Regional Hospital Board, but then the hospital board.”

One piece of advice I had early in my career as a journalist is: “If in doubt use lower case unless it looks wrong”.

Lastly, do not use capital letters for emphasis and avoid writing words in all capitals.

I’m so pleased this had nothing to do with me. This was published in _The Australian _ 15 years ago and spotted by Mumbrella.

So let’s do some role playing. You’re a sub on The Australian.

Your boss has just given a speech about the health of newspapers.

You’ve got to put a headline on the speech.

Do you a) Check the spelling of the word “newspapers” in the headline or b) Not check the spelling of the word “newspapers” in the headline? Remember, your career may depend on the choice you make.

I’m on the New Zealand Tech Podcast with Paul Spain.

nztechpodcast.com/new-iphon…

Talking about the Christchurch Call Summit and whether you need to constantly upgrade your phone among other things.

I explore the phone upgrade story in greater depth here:

billbennett.co.nz/how-long-…

Your school may have taught you not to end a sentence with a preposition. This is a hangover from Latin and Greek. Sentences in those languages never ended with prepositions.

Years ago I worked in communications for Britain’s Science and Engineering Research Council. My boss took me to task for ending a sentence with a preposition.

He told me it was; “Something, up with which, I will not put” – a quote from Winston Churchill.

Churchill was on my side in this. I suspect my boss didn’t realise the quote was a joke.

While the grammar police won’t agree, this is a rule you can ignore. It doesn’t apply to everyday writing, business writing, journalism and online communications.

There will be times it doesn’t make sense to twist sentences to avoid ending with a proposition. Your writing will be clearer and easier to understand.

Relax. You’ll be in great company. Most newspaper style guides allow it. Most popular authors and the overwhelming majority of modern literary authors sidestep the rule.

Google is one of a rare breed of companies that has moved into everyday language as a verb.

There are language purists who argue against turning nouns into verbs.

Don’t worry. It’s fine to “google something” online. People have “hoovered carpets” for years.

Note the lower case G and H.

Most of the time Google and Hoover are proper nouns requiring a capital.

There’s no such thing as a proper verb, so why should Google or Hoover take a capital when they are used as verbs?

Years ago when I was starting out as a journalist there was a regular supplement in the UK Press Gazette which argued exactly that: a company name used as a verb needs a capital.

I wasn’t convinced then. I’m not convinced now.

1. You don’t need fancy software to blog.
2. Free hosting services, like WordPress.com can as good as or better than self-hosting. You’ll need to pay for a few basics, but it won’t cost more than web hosting.
3. A low-cost, minimalist option like Micro.blog (where you are reading this post) is the best for anyone who’d rather write posts than mess around with code.
4. Blogging can take up a huge amount of time. It doesn’t have to.
5. There’s a community aspect to blogging. It isn’t apparent until you dive in and do it yourself.
6. Blogging is similar, but not the same as journalism.
7. My blogs don’t have any direct economic benefits, but they keep me in touch with audiences and show prospective clients that I’m alive and kicking.

Newspapers teach journalists to write using the inverted pyramid.

It isn’t always the best approach, but it is reliable. the inverted pyramid has worked for news writing since the days reporters telegraphed dispatches to editors. Today it works for online writing.

The structure echoes the classic essay structure you were taught — or should have been taught — at school.

The basic format:

Introduction — say what the piece is about; answer questions like who, what, where and when. You can also explain why at this point, although that can wait until later.

Then — expand, amplify;

Keep doing this until you’ve told the whole story. Make the most important points first then add more and more detail in each additional paragraph.

How did this develop? Printed newspaper had limited space for news. Traditional newspaper subeditors would cut a story from the bottom if it needs to fill a specific space on a printed page.

The inverted pyramid structure, with each paragraph being progressively less important, means editors remove the least important information first.

A news story written using the inverted pyramid structure can be cut at the end of any paragraph, even the first paragraph, and still be a self-contained story.

Online this means search engines pay more attention to the most important words – which helps people find your writing. Those opening paragraphs also make neat summaries for listings and similar online uses.

The most important information goes in the first paragraph and each extra paragraph carries progressively less weight. That’s where the inverted pyramid name comes from: the foundation sits at the top, the less important details are at the bottom.

If you want to make your writing clearer and more interesting, use ‘be’ verbs sparingly.

The verb to be includes:

Be, being, been, am, is, are, was, were.

Be verbs make text dull partly because of overuse, but also because they remove the reader one step from the action. They take readers the long route to meaning and can be long-winded.

Compare:

Fred is dismissive of cowboy films

with

Fred dismisses cowboy films.

The second phrase has more energy, it propels the reader along. It expresses the same idea in a clearer, more concise way.

Be verbs turn up in passive language, staying away from them helps keep your writing in the active voice.

Old-school newspapers taught journalists to never use be verbs in headlines, but prefer strong action verbs instead. It’s hard to get away with that in today’s online world, so think instead of keeping them to a minimum.

The active voice is usually better than the passive voice because it is direct. This makes it easier to understand and unambiguous. With the active voice a subject does something to an object: Andy kicked the ball.

In the passive voice the object is acted on by the subject: The ball was kicked by Andy.

An active voice makes for tighter writing and easier reading. It is more personal and less formal.

Efficient writing The passive sentence used six words while the active sentence needed only four. It has simpler grammar. Active sentences are economic and clear.

Active voice phrases are easier to understand because they involve fewer stages. Think of it as fewer mental hoops to jump through. This becomes important in more complex sentences and longer pieces of text.

While active voice sentences are also easier to write, you might not always find this in practice. The good news is that writing active sentences helps organise your own thoughts. That way you’ll write clearer.

Confident words Sentences written in the active voice read as if the writer is confident about the facts. In contrast, phrases and sentences written in the passive voice seem tentative or uncertain.

Bureaucrats and corporate managers often like hiding behind the passive voice’s ambiguities. Academics like to use it.

For example, in the phrase; “the claims have been analysed”, it isn’t clear who did the analysis. On the other hand; “We analysed the claims” is definite.

It gets worse when the writer resorts to using the word ‘it’ instead of ‘I’ or ‘we’: In the sentence “It was decided no claims would be payable” the author is deliberately hiding behind the ‘it’ implying that authority comes from on high and not identifying the person who did the deciding.

There are times when you need to use the passive voice. That’s another post

Winston Churchill said: “Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.”

He was right.

Short words are best because they don’t get in the reader’s way. They are familiar.

This makes them easy to understand and easy to spell.

They are also easier to pronounce.

Most short words in modern English come from Anglo-Saxon, not Latin, roots.

They mainly describe real world objects and actions, not abstract concepts.

Short words get straight to the point. Use as many of them as you can.

Good writing is direct, clear and precise. It gives readers direct insight into your thoughts and ideas.

Concrete nouns keep your writing on track. They are unambiguous and specific.

Use concrete nouns when you need to pin down facts and inform readers.

We describe nouns as concrete when they refer to something you can touch, smell, see, taste or hear. They are all things you sense directly.

Banana, chair, piston engine, trumpet, pterodactyl are all concrete nouns.

I like to think of concrete nouns as crunchy, but they could just as easily be squishy, smelly, loud or colourful.

As opposed to abstract nouns

On the other hand, abstract nouns are things you can’t form a picture of. They are ideas, conditions and qualities, such as courage and happiness.

Many abstract nouns started life as verbs or adverbs, but become abstract nouns with suffixes. So fascinate, becomes fascination, credible becomes credibility and so on.

Yet if you want to report on events or describe something, steer clear of abstract nouns.

Abstract nouns are useful when you want to generalise or when writing about ideas. They can be good for poetry, song lyrics and other flowery types of writing. At the same time they make it hard to figure out exactly what the writer means and are open to misinterpretation.

At school we were taught never to start sentences with “And”.

And yet newspaper journalists do it all the time. Not starting a sentence with “and” is one of the first so-called rules professional writers learn to break.

There’s nothing wrong with using “and” to begin a sentence or a paragraph. It is a great way to smooth the flow when you have a series of short sentences that would otherwise be too staccato for comfortable reading.

Only break this rule in moderation. Overusing “And” at the start of sentences quickly becomes boring.

As Keith Waterhouse points out in Daily Mirror Style, too many sentences starting with the word means your writing reads like the New English Bible.

Aim for only one “And” sentence start in a short piece of 300 words. For longer stories, you can get away with using it a few times – about once every 3-500 words. Control any urge to sprinkle sentences starting with “And” through your copy.

Other conjunctions

The school rule didn’t just apply to “And”, starting sentences with other conjunctions was also forbidden. As an aside, conjunctions are ‘joining’ words used to string phrases together – usually, but not always, to build more complex sentences.

There are plenty of alternative conjunctions to call on at the start of your sentences:

“But” is a great way to start a sentence that disagrees with the previous one. “Yet” is a less-frequently used alternative. “Or” is a great word for helping text flow. Some people don’t like sentences to start with “However”. That’s another rule worth breaking. “Although” is a possibility. In practice, it can be better to shorten the word to “Though” at the start of a sentence.

The term “content” is a barbarism that bit by bit devalues what journalists do.

• Jay Rosen, Chair of Journalism at New York University

Snappy writing works best online

First, people are less ready to read long pieces online than short articles.

Second, people read online material about 25 per cent slower than print. Jakob Nielsen explains why in In defence of print. Nielsen wrote his article in 1996, but things haven’t changed.

Countering distraction

Third, people get distracted easily online. There are advertisements and links to other websites as well as bleeping notification of incoming emails, tweets and instant messages.

If you write a brief article, there is more chance a reader will get to the end before skipping off elsewhere.

Brevity is the key

Fourth, skilled writers aim for brevity because good, vigorous English is concise.

A writer’s goal is to get messages to readers as swiftly and as accurately as possible.

Get on. Say what you need to say. Get off.

Leave the fancy, flowery stuff to poets and fiction writers.

Mac owners have a wide range of great writing apps to choose from. Here’s how to find the one that best suits your needs.

billbennett.co.nz/macos-gui…