Following on from the article Ten Writing Errors That Makes Your Blog Less Good, I want to look at some more writing tips.

Writingclasses.com lists George Orwell’s 12 Writing Tips, some key points include:

• What am I trying to say?
• Could I put it more shortly?
• Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Using i.e or e.g correctly – The term i.e. means “that is”; e.g. means “for example.” And a comma follows both of them.

Words Words Words looks at The Top Ten Tips for Improving Your Writing (dead link), some of the highlights include:

• Before you can be a writer, you must be a reader.
• Know your audience.
• Simple is better.
• Don’t listen to your friends, listen to your critics.
• Write what you know.

Vandelay Design discusses 10 Keys to Effective Writing for the Web:

• Use headings and sub-headings.
• Use short paragraphs.
• Include links in the article.

Daily Writing Tips looks at 10 Rules for Writing Numbers and Numerals:

• Spell small numbers out.
• Don’t start a sentence with a numeral.

I’m sure you wouldn’t have to look too hard to find enough writing errors in my Blog to sink a small fishing boat…so I’m riding shotgun on this one while my girlfriend (who’s an English teacher) gives me some advice. In her opinion, obvious errors in an article are as distracting as a really ugly font or a bad color scheme. Here is her top ten list of easily corrected writing errors.

1. Spelling. It might sound obvious but you’d be surprised how many people let their enthusiasm for posting overwhelm the necessity of a decent spell check.
2. Punctuation. As glaringly obvious as this point may be, if you’re distracted by what you’re writing and forget to check your work over, full stops and commas are the first things to fall off the back of the article. If you don’t have the correct punctuation the sense of your writing can be affected. Have you heard the story about the Panda who eats, shoots and leaves? Did the Panda have a nice meal of bamboo foliage, or did it consume its food, kill the waiter and run away? It’s all about putting the right punctuation in the right place.
3. Apostrophes. These deserve their own bullet point. Here’s a really basic list of rules.
• Use an apostrophe if the word is a contraction. (If it’s made smaller by taking out some letters, the apostrophe stands in for the missing letters) E.g. Can not becomes can’t.
• Use an apostrophe to show possession. E.g. The cat’s toys. (The toys belong to the cat) If there are multiple cats then you have to shift the apostrophe to the other side of the ‘s’. So it would read: The cats’ toys.
• NEVER use an apostrophe to show plural. E.g. Apple’s for sale should actually read Apples for sale. NO apostrophe.
• Apostrophes should not be used with possessive pronouns because possessive pronouns already show possession – they don’t need an apostrophe. His, her, its, my, yours, ours are all possessive pronouns.”
4. Slang. As tempting as it is to write as you speak, even with the idea of appealing to a certain audience, slang is clunky to read, tends to reduce your assumed authority on a topic and may alienate more people than it attracts on the basis that they have no idea what you’re talking about.
5. Followed swiftly by the dreaded text (txt) language. Lts of ppl cnt rd dat txt lang, cos its 2 abv.
6. Circumlocution. The word that I have aforementioned is a term that is not commonly used and in fact, not generally known by many people but it serves to define a regularly occurring phenomenon in blog writing that has the tendency to detract from good ideas and genuinely favorable writing by filling the readers receptors with an overwhelming and therefore unacceptable amount of words. Or…Circumlocution: the use of more words than necessary to express an idea.
7. Tense. Are you writing your article in the present, past or future? Any of them are fine, but make sure you pick one and stick with it.
8. Sense. This might seem like silly advice to give to anyone over the age of 12, but you need to make sure that what you have written, from the individual sentences to the bigger paragraphs actually makes sense. Read it out loud…sometimes your eyes will miss it but it will usually sound wrong to your ears if you’ve messed up somewhere.
9. Use features like CAPITALS, italics and bold effectively. They are brilliant to provide emphasis but if you are too liberal with them then they lose their impact.
10. Nobody ever said formal or correct writing couldn’t be funny, clever or individual. These common mistakes distract your reader but correcting them shouldn’t mean that you sacrifice your style. If you clean up the minor errors in your writing then it means that what you’re actually saying will become more attractive to read.