Clarity and Brevity Make Good Blogging

Is word count important when writing posts? Would you always enjoy reading a post overly written? Have you thought about how readers feel when they have to scroll at length in a single post?

Let’s face it. When the words start flowing it’s not always easy to control our fingers on the keyboard. We find it difficult to chop a single word. And we end up with texts full of adjectives, adverbs and unnecessary words which hardly add any value and are not easily digestible. They make reading boring.

Well, it’s a fact that people read much slower from the screen than from a print out. It is therefore important to pay attention to word count. Writing in a clear, concise and straightforward manner will go a long way in developing and maintaining good readership.

I won’t pretend to be a mentor here. I just want to share some useful tips I found at The Writers’ Perspective. In her post Blogs: How to Keep your Word Count Down, Maria Schneider stresses on the need to avoid wordiness. Keep it short,” she says. “Be ruthless. Cut down your wordiness. It will make your post more concise and readable and that’s essential to good blogging. Good writing = Good blogging.”

In her follow-up post Cutting words in your posts: Part 2 Maria gives a concrete example of how you can write ‘cleaner and tighter” by editing your post.

I know you should be asking yourself: “How short?” While there’s no hard and fast rule, “300 words a post is a good target,” recommends Maria in her 20 Tips for Good Blogging.

I hope these make sense to any would-be blogger or anyone interested in revisiting their blog and improving their style.

So, keep writing and mind your word count when you write your next post. I’ll be more careful myself.

4 Comments

  1. Wakish January 31, 2008
  2. Alfa King February 1, 2008
  3. Mike Fook Fiction February 3, 2008
  4. Kristen King February 6, 2008

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