Leahey.org

Yes, its one more how-to-write-an-Article article. How-to write a more clear, concise, understandable entry.

Before Starting

Before starting to write your entry, and after choosing your topic, list between 15 and 25 concepts you would like to hit in your article. If you are unable to do this, choose a new topic. Your topic should not only interest your readers, but interest you. Passion is not something easily faked, and can be read rather easily in an article.

Outline

If you aren’t willing to sketch out a quick outline, you shouldn’t be writing this article. Take your 15-25 concepts, boil them down in to 8-10 solid ideas, and arrange them in a logical order.

The Paragraph Order

Sentences should be arranged in a clear sequence. Hasty thinking causes a lack of unity in your entries, and will likely result in a strange arrangement of your sentences. Be careful not to write as you think, in other words, don’t just write down ideas as they come to you and press Publish. Your mind is not set up to think in clear paragraphs, because it’s thoughts don’t have to make sense to anybody but you. Your entries, on the other hand, do.

The Paragraph Size

We all learned this in elementary school, but bloggers seem to have forgotten somewhere along the line. Make sure your paragraph is of a proper length and make sure you aren’t just hitting enter at random points. Each paragraph should have five or six sentences all related to each other. Start with a clear topic sentence, followed by 3-4 supporting sentences and finishing with a closing sentence that wraps up your ideas. If you have a layout with a small content area, as in not particularly wide, you may have to adjust this.

The Daunting Paragraph

Concerning paragraph size, we need to also remember we are not being graded for grammatical correctness. A long, daunting-looking paragraph that just breathes uninteresting is more likely to get a potential reader to move on than a short one is. If you’ve written a huge block of content, any more than 8 lines on your layout, consider breaking it up in to two seperate paragraphs.

Revise

Go back over your entry, read each paragraph carefully. See if there is anything you do not need, or a concept you’re pumping five sentences out of, but could be summed up in two. Try to boil down each paragraph. In other words, without creating run-on sentences, attempt to remove one sentence from every paragraph. If you’re able to do this, you’re over-writing. Either shorten the entry or choose a new topic that you can write more about.