General Recommedations from the Red Pen
I mentioned in Why You Only Need 3 People to Read Your Blog that I’ve been reading and editing manuscripts, and advising other spiritually-focused writers regarding books they hope to publish and how to use blogs to market their work and build an audience.
There is a definite pattern — an overlap — to the comments I’ve made on all these books. The improvements I’ve suggested these writers consider, in order to make their manuscripts tighter, stronger, and more effective, can be universally applied to your books, articles, and blog posts.
Note: The overarching preface of my Red Pen is “Do as I say; not as I do.”
The Formal, Plural, Royal WE
Are you writing about yourself or from a position that is pretensiously plural? The majority of blogs are entirely produced by individuals. In the online environment, the first-person voice has quickly become an assumed, accepted standard; there is no need to emulate corporate publications by pretending to be a company of many.
Before the blogging revolution took hold, solo entrepreneurs and internet marketers tried to disguise the One Wo/Man Show by referring to the editorial team in the plural:
- About Us
- Our Mission
- Contact Us
WE this, WE that… Many self-publishers wrongly assumed that readers, potential clients, customers, partners, or prospects wouldn’t take you seriously unless they believed your operation had a large staff and big business intentions.
On a blog, obviously authored by one person, this comes off as ridiculous. If you work with a team of people, or if you’re blogging on behalf of a business with multiple employees or partners, then by all means refer to yourselves collectively.
If you’re the only person behind the screens, then embrace that solo identity with transparency and authenticity — use the pronouns I and me wherever relevant.
The Myth of the Inclusive WE
Authors and bloggers seem to be self-consciously aware of the masses in mass media. You think because potentially hundreds of people will read your words that you should address them as if they’re all — presently — in the room with you.
If you’re writing a speech, meant to be delivered to an auditorium full of listeners, this would certainly be appropriate; but you, the individual author, is always connecting to you, the individual reader. If your reader is holding a physical book or page in her hands, or if she’s squinting over your blog on her laptop screen, reading is an almost universally personal and private experience.
Even if a million people read your book, they will each do so alone.
No matter how many years I’ve been writing with an awareness of this tendency, I still find myself drifting into this inclusive we once in awhile — when you’re writing about humanity as a whole, when your voice is intended to represent a large number of people or establish a feeling of being included in a shared experience, you naturally start choosing words that reflect multiples.
“We, the People…”
This is overly formally. Your book and your blog posts are not legal documents or royal decrees. The private connection you’re making as an author to an individual reader is already understood. When you draw attention to the presence of other readers, you actually create a sense of alienation for your reader — the exact opposite of the sense of inclusion, or belonging to a group of like-minded individuals.
When you write “We’re over here, being us” the mind of the individual reader is thinking “I’m here, by myself — where are they? Somewhere I’m clearly not.”
Avoid addressing the masses, wherever you have a choice. Always write as if you and your reader are having a one-on-one experience — this is literal and accurate.
An Experience of One’s Own
The formal singular possessive pronoun in English — one – makes no one feel like a visible, important individual. While you may have been taught to write academic papers in grammatically correct Queen’s English, beware the emotional impact of adhering to formality.
Your blog is not a PhD dissertation; your self-improvement book is not a classroom address.
Writing like a Queen to her subjects will produce a similar emotional impact — your reader will sense pretention, or respond defensively, to what comes across as a Holier-than-thou position.
The informal, personal language of email and the web has impacted popular usage to the point that today’s high-circulation newspapers and most-watched television talking heads now model their tone accordingly — emulating the informal, personal connection.
Ideally, you want to write like you speak. If you want your reader to feel like she’s listening to her best friend, compose your words as if you are writing to your best friend.
When in doubt, reading your words out loud is the best test. Try literally holding a phone to your head while you read and see if your voice flows with a natural, familiar tone.
Passive Voice
Remember School House Rock and the Verb? The Verb was portrayed as the Superhero of Sentence Structure. Passive verb usage remains the all time, number one killer of strong prose.
In English, when you place an active verb between a form of to be, coupled with the suffix ing, you essentially cripple the verb. You rip his cape off and give him a crutch under each arm, and an otherwise powerful sentence becomes a slow, hobbling mess.
If you start off a post in passive voice, consistency requires that you continue; this wishy-washy cancer ends up in the blood stream of your words and spreads through the entire piece.
Retraction! Behind the Screens Update
Jeff Lilly just busted me and reamed me out with a grammar-puss citation for blathering on, using the description of passive voice, incorrectly.
See the comments below for that conversation — Jeff was so kind in the way he approached me about my snafu… I feel it deserves to live with this article, the way it evolved. (I also don’t feel like rewriting it or pulling it right now — let’s treat it like the internet equivalent of a fender bender, and I’ll just stand out here, humbled and vulnerable, next to my knocking, pinging, steaming mashed-up craft!)
Oscar Wilde Syndrome is a special brand of passive voice bred from an illusion of intelligence — a glamour — smoke and mirrors and distracting special effects. Your blog is not being graded on whether or not you’ve satisfied a minimum number of pages; avoid padding your sentences with fluff, pomp, and set-up fragments that meander about gathering gloss and embellishment before getting to the point.
Spit it out — what are you trying to say? Subject + Verb. Be succinct. Get to the point.
“Due to a growing sense of blah blah blah, often riddled with yada yada yada, and considering factor x, not to mention factor y, and more often times than not, factor z, one has a tendency to find oneself feeling rather badly about the way in which one’s life has…”
Oh, give me a freaking break! Did you mean to say something more like:
“You feel like shit. Your self-esteem is in the toilet. You hate your life because of factors x, y, and z.”
That’s the story. That’s the point, right?
Don’t grandstand and mill about for three lines showing off your collection of hundred-dollar words if it means your reader falls asleep waiting for you to deliver.
You’re not impressing your reader — you’re trying his patience and testing his short online attention span.
To sum up:
- write like you speak — informal, conversational style is ideal
- address your reader, person-to-person, one-on-one
- employ direct, active verbs and succinct sentence structure
- impress your reader by reflecting her inner-most thoughts and feelings — not by taking her on a tour of your inner theasaurus
Slade Roberson is an intuitive counselor, ATP®, professional blogger, and the author of Shift Your Spirits, Automatic Intuitive Response, and the PageCoach Problogging Tutorial Series. Slade on Blogging shares behind-the-screens internet marketing, self-publishing, and blogging strategies with other personal development writers, coaches, and healing arts practitioners.
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13 Responses to “General Recommedations from the Red Pen”
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Dear Slade,
Thank you very much for this post. I have printed it out because it is particularly relevant to me, and something I need to remember every time I sit down to compose an article or my newsletter.
So thank you, again.
I’ve just recently ordered your PageCoach Problogging Tutorial and I’m very excited about starting my own Blog.
Many Blessings,
Richard
Hey dude! I’ve just adored your last few posts — I’ve been drinking them up like fine wine. But near the end of your “Red Pen” article I was brought up short.
I hate to do this, but –
They make us take this oath when we become linguists…
Passive voice is not “is” + “ing”. You’re describing progressive aspect, as in “He is running”. Nothing passive about that. Passive is some form of “be” (is, was, etc.) + the perfective form, as in “He was beaten”. The perfective usually looks like the past tense, but also frequently has the -n or -en ending. You use it in the sentence “The Verb was portrayed as the Superhero of Sentence Structure”.
There’s nothing particularly passive about the passive voice. It’s just a way of focusing attention on an argument of the verb that wouldn’t normally be the subject, e.g. “Suddenly, they were surrounded by the police”.
How about just calling it “passive writing”? I think that’s what you really mean, anyway. The example you give of dreadful writing has not one passive verb in it.
But your overall point is very clear, and well taken!
I don’t mean to be pedantic — I really don’t. I mean, it’s certainly not just you that’s confused about the passive — it’s an epidemic.
I just hate to see an inaccuracy like that mar an otherwise awesome piece, you know?
Oh, I just knew I should avoid grammar…
How about I just append my errors with YOUR response? I can’t think of a more direct way to capture corrections.
You certainly understood the context I intended with passive voice — as in passive writing STYLE — it’s more a behavior people use in their own heads, whether they’re literally writing it or just authoring it.
I am so NOT explaining rules of grammar, here — and I absolutely don’t want to. I promise to refer to this concept as passive writing or passive expression or… something else. I don’t have a better suggestion.
You explain it better than I can (probably care about it more than I do too) and I feel no shame in having you show everybody how I screwed that up.
It enhances my honesty and keeps it real, man.
Thank God I didn’t go through with that Linguist Oath thing… sounds like drag.
: )
Wait… do you mean it “sounds like drag” or “sounds like a drag”??
Personally I think grammar would be a lot more fun if it were explained by teachers wearing drag. Too bad English doesn’t have grammatical gender…
Append away, with my blessing.
Okay, I can’t win today — I’m under attack — grammar puss fur is flying all over the ether…
Sounds like A drag — yes!
Hey Jeff, I can be the slapstick and you be the straight man and we’ll do Grammar Vaudeville, whadda ya say?
I actually have seen teachers explain grammar in drag. Trust me on this, and wonder about that another time. Maybe that’s the whole problem — I was scarred by Language Arts education — hideously, now beyond even being able to care much!
It’s only fair I take some Red Pen slashes — you would be the one to do it, too.
Here are the Remains and Abandoned Hopes of My Writing Posts that Talk about Grammar - R. I. P.
I dodged a bullet, if you want to know how I really feel…
There are two kinds of people that care about grammar: the Good People and the Bad People.
The Bad People far outnumber the Good People. The Bad People are the ones who write books like “Eats, Shoots, and Leaves”, who like to emphasize the importance of Good Grammar and Correct Comma Usage and the Conjugations of Participles and say things like By God Don’t You Dare Split Infinitives and A Preposition at the End of a Sentence is the Work of the Devil. They eat lots of unsweetened oatmeal.
The Good People are people like yours truly who believe that the structure of language — as used by regular people — is a Reflection of the Ultimate. I honestly believe — really and truly — that if we knew all the secrets of grammar, and why people put words together the way they do, we would know all the secrets of Mind and Spirit. So yeah, you could say I take an interest in grammar.
All of which is SO far off topic it ain’t even funny. Sorry to hijack your comment thread, dude. I’ll shut up now.
No, man, this is AWESOME!
Because you’ve found reason to make a stronger statement about the spiritual significance of how we communicate than I could’ve written intentionally — as an article.
I think the conversation here about my errors is more crucial than my having never posted them. And I couldn’t have dragged a better quote out of you if I’d emailed you for one…
Thanks Richard!
I hope my attempt to explain how to write/express your thoughts ACTIVELY still comes through.
I’m always particularly flattered when someone tells me he printed out one of my articles (note: print is a powerful medium that’s not going away anytime soon).
Since you’ve been producing a newsletter or ezine, I’m confident that you’ll find blogging to be a more direct writing and publishing tool.
Please come back and let us know when your blog is up and running, and contact me with any questions I can answer for you.
Thanks much, Slade.
I appreciate the encouragement and the offer. Will take you up on it soon.
Blessings,
R
Slade/Jeff/Richard,
Excellent article - again!!!! - you’re becoming far too prolific
And Jeff - through your friendly tete-e-tete you’ve touched on something I felt when I was re-discovering my Tarot Cards recently. By studying them in much more detail and great intensity over a week I felt that I could ‘read’ anything in a similar way.
I began doing it with e-mails, articles, art - whatever! and found that I was beginning to divine the energy between the words - to touch on the very essence that the author was trying to get across within the limitations of the written word.
As a fellow Druid sympathiser you already know that they ‘read’ the flickers of flames, the leaves scattered on the ground - and Yes - the entrails of sacrificies. I’m not saying we should start slaying animals to find our way but there is certainly something in cutting through the words in search of the source.
Finally - Robert - GO FOR IT! I’ve loved every minute of discovering the Community and therefore myself through my Blog (which I prefer to call a site) and as Slade says ‘Start Blogging Yesterday’.
Take care All,
Damian
Damian,
It’s easier to be “prolific” (don’t know that I deserve that compliment) when writing about such practical information.
Yet another reason to do a little bit of everything you love, work on multiple projects simultaneously… Shift Your Spirits requires me to go to such a different place to produce content, while this blog exercises muscles not required by the mysticism.
I find it’s easier for me to write if I can change gears — if I’m up against a wall in one room, I simply go work in another one, you know?
Also, focusing my marketing and blogging advice on this community, specifically, has energized it. Narrowing the target has allowed me to truly zoom in and have a look around more clearly.
Thanks for being a special member of that Sweet Spot in my conversation, the overlap between my projects. The shift is proving to be a good one.
Slade, as you know I always print out your information. That way I can read it several times at my leisure. Your articles are always good. Lately, they have gotten better. They are great. Your personal and professional growth is reflected in the writing you have done recently. Please keep up the great work. You are truly an encouragement to those of us just getting started with our own blogs. Patricia
Thanks for the encouragement, Patricia!
Starting over, to a certain degree, and bringing my web development and marketing experience in closer alignment with Shift Your Spirits has both freed me up and given me a greater sense of focus.
I’m glad that comes through in the articles. I can’t think of any group of people better to work for…