Please Visit: Common Blogging Mistakes: Guide For Freelancers
Writing skills are skills that enable an individual to write lucidly, coherently, and grammatically with ease and speed. Writing skills are important because they express who you are as a person, helps you move easily among facts, inferences and opinions without getting confused and without confusing your reader. Also, it promotes your ability to pose worthwhile questions, fosters your ability to explain a complex position to readers and to yourself. Finally, writing skills helps others give you feedback.
I have never been good in languages. When it comes to science subjects like physics, chemistry, mathematics and Information Technology I would be comfortable learning them. I hated composition writing because to be honest creating a story from my imagination and writing it was my greatest weakness. To add salt to injury, our language teachers at High School did not teach us the secrets of being creative during composition writing. I therefore ended up getting average grades in languages.
When I was new to blogging I found that writing articles was a huge challenge. Even when I wrote my first online article, my English was a problem. When my mentor read my first article, she told me that I have made a lot of grammatical errors but it was a start. I asked myself whether I should enroll for English classes or learn the hard way which is trial and error. I opted for the latter. How to learn by trial and error is not as difficult as it seems. The three ways of learning by trial and error are:-
Writing articles through an article editor like Ms Word
Writing and submitting articles at Ezine Articles Directory
Reading Online Articles from Established Authors
Writing Articles through an Article Editor like Ms Word
Ms Word is a word processing application that allows users to type documents such as articles. It has a lot of editing features like:-
- Search and replace
- Cut, copy and paste
- Paragraph alignment tools
- Various heading styles
- Font Styles such as Bold, Italicize and Underline.
- Etc
When writing articles using Ms Word, you will notice sometimes a red or green wavy line appearing under your word or sentence. A red wavy line means that you have made a spelling error and a green wavy line means that you have made grammatical errors. Once you correct those errors, then that marks the beginning of writing good articles for your blog.
Writing and submitting articles at Ezine Articles Directory
Writing articles at Ezine Articles Directory is a big bonus because, Ezine teaches you indirectly how to write good articles. After subscribing to their mailing list, Ezine sends you and its subscribed member’s tips on how to improve on writing articles. For example, they recently send me an article titled ten common mistakes of word usage and how to overcome them.
Every time I submit articles to their directory, ezine would point out mistakes like:-
- Article Submitted contains grammatical errors and articles submitted must use correct English Grammar and American or British Spelling.
- Article submitted is not informative.
But, if your article does not contain errors and adheres to Ezine’s editorial guidelines then it will be accepted.
Reading Online Articles from Established Authors
If your blog talks about how to dance hip hop, you must read similar blogs that talk about your niche. You have to note how the blogger is structuring his sentences. Look at the images that explain his article, how many sentences make a paragraph and is he using examples to justify his hypothesis?
In conclusion, writing excellent blog posts is the same as learning how to walk. It takes time and years of practice. Just like professional wrestling, it takes the wrestlers’ years of practice to execute their moves perfectly.
This has been Wilfred Imbukwa signing out.
Cheers.