Hooking Readers In: Lessons Bloggers Can Learn from Journalists

Blogs may be vastly different in their scope and purpose, but overall they share certain similar traits: an informal, first-person writing style and content laced heavily with the opinion of the blogger. Neither of these traits is necessarily bad. However, bloggers can certainly learn a thing or two from the journalistic style of writing that could improve their blogs' quality (and maybe even gain them new readers).

1.) The Inverted Pyramid. If you've got something great to share in a blog, don't write in a meandering way and work up to it get to the punch line from the start to hook the reader in. A hallmark of good journalism is the "inverted pyramid" writing style. All that means is a journalist must put the most vital piece of information in the first paragraph, or more often, in the very first sentence of a news article. Once the good stuff is out, the journalist fills in the gaps using the rest of the article. The inverted pyramid serves two purposes in journalism: One, to get the most essential information across to readers who have a nasty habit of only reading headlines and entry paragraphs, and two, for space constraints; if there's not enough space in the paper to contain all of the original article, an editor can simply cut the article from the bottom, leaving the most essential information intact at the top. Now, why does this matter to bloggers? Because online readers, particularly readers of blogs, like to skim for things that matter. If you don't catch their attention with something valuable in the first two sentences of your blog, you've lost them. Helpful hint: Try spending more time on the first three sentences of your blog than the rest of your blog.

2.) Catchy Headlines. In the world of journalism, headlines sell newspapers. For instance, a local newspaper with an otherwise ho-hum cover story about damaging hail sold like hotcakes when the copy editor chose the headline "Oh hail no!" The same is true of blogs. When someone is doing a Google search for blogs on your subject area, they will be drawn to catchy and clever headlines.

3.) Unbiased Writing with Sources Cited. Good journalism is fair and balanced, never revealing the opinion of the journalist. Journalists must also cite their sources (this is easier online due to linking). A blogger should not consider himself or herself above this process. While a blogger is entitled to his or her opinion, he or she should back that opinion up with fact, linking to relevant websites when necessary. Personal anecdotes are great in a blog, but your readers will take you more seriously if you also link to helpful news articles, research or blogs that back up your opinions. Bloggers should also be careful not to "borrow" the words (or even ideas) of fellow bloggers without giving them credit and quoting them when necessary.

4.) Editing and Copy-editing. Finally, before any article ever goes to press, it goes through at least two levels of editing first for grammar, spelling and punctuation and second for style. Bloggers can take this process to heart by combing through their blogs for factual errors, eliminating redundancies, re-writing poorly-written sentences, spicing up downright boring sentences, and cleaning up misspellings before hitting the submit button.

This guest post is contributed by Tim Handorf, who writes on the topics of online colleges and universities. He welcomes your comments at his email Id: tim.handorf.20@googlemail.com.

Comments

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