TheWritersBag.com

Close your eyes for a moment and visualize the world’s most physically beautiful individual. Now answer this question: What makes that person beautiful?

Deep, mysterious eyes set just so far apart? Perfectly formed lips? Stunning skin coloring? Full, wavy hair? Imposing cheek bones? The list goes on. No matter how many physical attributes you mention, I guarantee you will miss some that impact your perception of that person’s beauty, such as certain subtle relationships between facial features and the way everything comes together to form an attractive whole.

Plus, you will not likely be able to put your finger on some appealing characteristics that are less tangible than hair color or the shape of the mouth – like that almost imperceptible widening of the eyes or quick tilting of the head. You’re probably not even aware of many of these things on a conscious level. But they are there and you notice them whether you consciously realize it or not.

Asking “What makes a good article,” is a lot like asking why someone looks beautiful to you. When you read the article, you will be aware of certain things you like about it (good information, easy to read and understand, concise), but you will not be able to put your finger on other elements that draw you to it. They are too subtle. Understated stylistic techniques, slight inflections of tone, the ability to maintain just the right amount of tension throughout the piece, and a plethora of additional elements and characteristics play important but often invisible roles in making an article “good” or “bad.”

You can’t apply a formula to this. It’s far too complex. If it could be formulized, machines would spit out wonderful articles in reams and article writers would be out of work.

What you can do, however, is work on one way to improve your writing at a time. Work on titles until you become a great title writer. Work on pacing until you become a super-star at it. Work on content organization until you can do it in your sleep.

But whatever you do, don’t overanalyze the article writing process. If you do you’ll be like the golfer or tennis player who returns from a long lesson with a pro only to find that she’s thinking so much about everything she learned that she can’t feel it anymore and can’t even take a decent swing.

Ongoing improvements are essential to success in the writing game. But over-analysis will paralyze you – and paralyzed writers don’t write good articles.

Paragraphs are wonderful writing tools. They help organize text into succinct units of ideas and information. They also add visual relief by inserting white space into the document and breaking up the text, making it more inviting to the reader.

Too many writers fail to take advantage of these benefits by making their paragraphs too long. Long paragraphs typically bring pieces of text together that would be better off separated for organizational purposes. They also create long chunks of text that intimidate readers. (If you want your readers not to read something, bury it in a long paragraph.)

Look at the following excerpt from a magazine article I wrote about a small rural town….

If you could go to a doctor and get a prescription for the maladies of big city living, that prescription would be Orofino, Idaho.

Now check out the same text, this time packed together into a single paragraph….

If you could go to a doctor and get a prescription for the maladies of big city living, that prescription would be Orofino, Idaho. Sick of bumping into people everywhere you go, fighting traffic, waiting in long lines? Tired of being trapped in a suffocating environment of asphalt, brick and concrete? Frustrated with the hectic pace of a life that’s insulated from the natural rhythms of nature? Take a dose of Orofino. You’ll feel much better very soon. That’s because Orofino (Spanish for “fine gold”) is the gold standard in small-town, western America. The community has all the potential of becoming a full-blown travel destination like Jackson, Wyoming, but has not yet lost its innocence. It remains untainted and real.

Which treatment is more appealing to you? If you’re like the vast majority of people, you found the multi-paragraph version much easier to read – more visually inviting. The white spaces attract the eye, breaking up the information into bite-size pieces. (This applies even if you’re using the paragraph format with indented first lines and no lines between paragraphs.) The multi-paragraph approach also allowed me to more carefully organize the information I was trying to convey, and to visually pop out the “Take a dose of Orofino….” statement, giving it more impact.

One word of caution: Don’t go overboard with this! I have seen whole pages filled with long strings of tiny, one- or two-sentence paragraphs. I found myself hungering for a longer paragraph to break things up. A variety of paragraph sizes simply looks better, so don’t be afraid to throw longer ones into your manuscript occasionally, as long as they make sense from an organizational standpoint.

I just read a plea from someone who writes for a Web site asking for help with grammar. It’s interesting that so many bloggers and Web site owners are feeling the pressure to use proper English when they write their posts or Web content.

And well they should. Grammar and usage errors reflect negatively on a writer’s image and credibility. Like everyone else who writes anything that will be read by others, bloggers and Web site owners shoot themselves in their collective feet if they write poorly. Then can have the best information in the world, but if they present it in a way that screams “uneducated lout,” people will question the value and integrity of the information itself.

So where do you go for help with grammar? There are tons of books out there in printed and online formats. But they tend to be chloroform in print and you have to read through endless pages of rules to find the ones you actually don’t know.

Another problem you face is that you often don’t know that you don’t know certain rules. For example, I spent years as a full-time freelance writer putting hyphens in phrases like “the book was well-written” when I shouldn’t have used them, and not putting hyphens in phrases like “a well written book” when I should have used them. (If you’re confused, you can read a full explanation of this issue by clicking here.

In my years as a professional writer, I’ve noted the English rules and issues that people are most likely to get wrong when they write. I’ve addressed these in what I hope is an easy-to-digest, straightforward way in the “Writing Rules” category of posts on this blog site. It took me years to cull these out and make sense of them. I hope they can be of use to you as you work to improve your writing.

PS. I compiled the 50 most commonly abused rules and issues into an e-book (click here). I’ve found that if people learn these, they will eliminate almost all the mistakes writers commonly make. And they won’t have to pore through hundreds of pages and thousands of rules to zero in on them.