Simple Tweaks to Improve Your Online Writing

You’ll never become the best writer you can become — which is the beauty of writing.

With the written word, there’s always room for improvement.

I’ve got three simple things you can do to fine-tune your writing so you can better express your thoughts and keep readers coming back for more.

Let’s go!

1/ Write first, then edit

One common mistake people make is editing as they write.

This is a fatal error, one that’s stopping you from having real impact with your words.

Sometimes people think to themselves, “If I edit as I write, I’m knocking out two tasks instead of just one.”

WRONG!

Editing is meant to be done AFTER writing, not during.

Why is that?

Well, when you’re writing, you’re getting your thoughts out on to the page.

Oftentimes when you write, you don’t even know what some of your thoughts are…

Which is why writing is referred to as a process of discovery.

Your own writing allows you to discover thoughts and insights you might not have known you have.

Does an archaeologist stop digging when he comes across one single find?

No! He keeps digging so he can find new stuff. If he stopped digging when he found one relic and focused solely on that one relic — polishing it, cleaning it, taking photos of it — he’d never move on to find the other good stuff that’s buried in the dirt.

Write your entire first draft… or, at the very least, write as much of it as you can. Then go back and edit it.

2/ Read it out loud.

Online writing needs to be conversational.

If it sounds too formal, readers lose interest.

Once you’ve finished your first draft and you’ve begun editing, read your writing out loud.

It’ll reveal areas where pacing is off and where revisions need to be made.

As a general rule, when writing online, pretend as though you’re sitting in a coffee shop with a friend.

When you’re sitting with a friend, you don’t talk in technical jargon or in some fancy academic fashion…

You speak in simple language. Slang included.

If you’ve written something that reads differently than something you’d say in a conversation with a friend, go back and edit it to make it conversational.

After all, most readers online have a very low reading level and our duty as content and copy writers is to continually hook the reader so they keep going.

3/ Use lots of white space

For some reason, the human brain doesn’t really like big blocks of text.

Unless we’re reading a novel, a biography, or some other print book, we don’t want to see big long paragraphs.

One of the reasons print books don’t use white space is because they have a limited number of physical pages to fit the story into.

When you’re writing digitally, you have tons and tons of space.

Take advantage of it. Be liberal with the “return” key.

Something about white space pleases our senses; something about text blocks deters us.

There is really no right way to use white space. You don’t need to hit “return” after every end-stop… you can write more than one sentence per line, as long as the two sentences relate to one another.

Do your readers a favor by giving them plenty of white space. They’ll appreciate you.

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