What Every Writer Should Remember from Freshmen English

By My Web Writers

Photo courtesy of SingleMomFinance.com

If your high school textbooks are gathering dust or long recycled, and you can’t remember how exactly you spent those arduous academic days, it may be time to brush up on a few of the basics from high school English, even if just to see which rules have changed.

In high school, teachers break down the components of a piece of writing so that students will have a vocabulary to help them in the writing and revision process. Seasoned writers can also benefit from evaluating their work with these tools. Let’s take a look at some of these components.

Audience

The audience is the group of people you expect or want to read your work. It is usually good to have an age group, education level, and some demographics in mind. This can be as simple as people who like pie or more specific like women with children in their thirties and forties. Regardless, your language and ideas need to be appropriate for the people you expect to read your work.

Consider what background information may be necessary, what important terms may need defining, and what kind of voice will appeal to your audience. When writing for a medical journal, the language and ideas may be more complex, because the writer assumes that readers have a certain level of familiarity with the discipline. Whereas when explaining a complex medical condition in an article on al site geared toward the general public, more familiar language may be used along with metaphors and similes that make the information accessible to those without a medical education.

If you’re worried about accessing a specific grade-level, Microsoft Word has a handy tool that estimates the grade-level and readability of your writing based on word, sentence, and paragraph complexity.  This can be enabled when you click on File, Options, Proofing, and check Readability Statistics. These statistics appear after you spell check your document.

 Purpose

What is your piece trying to accomplish? After reading, do you want readers to buy a specific brand of shoe, agree with a political argument, or know how to bake a cake? This should be clear to you the writer and should be stated directly or indirectly in your work. In an academic paper, the purpose is often encountered in the thesis statement. A thesis states what the paper plans to prove or explain. It is usually located at the end of the introduction paragraph.

 Organization

Regardless of the kind of writing you are doing, some method of organization is always necessary. Some common structures include, cause and effect, chronological order, and compare and contrast.  A recipe is usually organized with an ingredient list and then the steps are described in chronological order. A blog post about a political issue may compare and contrast the two sides of an issue by spending the first section explaining one side of the issue, it’s pros and cons, and then in the next section considering the other side.

In essays, each paragraph usually proves or addresses an aspect of the argument. One or more paragraphs may represent a point the author is trying to prove. Once that point has been supported, the writer is ready to begin a new paragraph.

 Evidence and Analysis

Any work that is making a claim requires some kind of evidence and analysis. Evidence includes the facts that support an argument. Analysis is the author’s explanation of why the evidence is important or how it relates to the argument. Evidence helps the writer to establish his or her authority and support ideas. Analysis helps the reader to make the same connections between the argument and the evidence that the writer is making.

 Grammar and Spell Check

Grammar and spelling mistakes can be off-putting for readers and threaten a writer’s credibility, especially where there are so many resources at hand to aid in proofreading.  Remember that different styles of writing often have different rules and call for different styles of documentation. Style guides are available on writing center websites for many colleges and universities. Purdue Online Writing Lab has an especially good guide for APA and MLA styles. Remember that Microsoft Word has spelling and grammar check, but doesn’t catch everything and sometimes makes unnecessary changes. So it is always good to proofread again. And of course, never turn in a piece that you haven’t read more than once.

Happy writing.  Class dismissed.

~Lindsey

How to Better Analyze Data and Draw Logical Conclusions

By My Web Writers

Each time you receive analytics data it is loaded with useful information. But unless you know how to interpret that information, it’s virtually worthless. Once you learn how to read and understand analytics data, it can help drive your content marketing. Whether you do the writing yourself, or you rely on the help of a copy writing service, it is imperative that you understand your analytics data.

Set Aside Time to Analyze

If you plan on flipping through an analytics report and getting anything of substance from it, you won’t learn very much. Analyzing takes time. Set aside a certain amount of time each week to really dive into your results. Analytics data does nothing for you or your business if you don’t study it and understand it.

Check for Keywords

What are the keywords that are driving people to your site? It may surprise you to find what words are and aren’t working. Experiment with keywords each week or month to see which ones are the most useful for your business. Once you know what they are, you can use them more and drive even more traffic to your website.

Take Note of the Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is a percentage of readers who visit your site on a specific page and leave without clicking to other parts of the site. This can be a huge statistic for you when trying to figure out what content is working for you and what isn’t. If you have an unusually high bounce rate for a specific page, figure out why. Was it low in key words? Did it lack good content? Check the pages with low bounce rates. What was it that kept people on your site?

However, don’t necessarily assume there must be a problem with your website or your content. There’s always the chance that the issue is with the referral traffic – what types of people are being sent to your site and why. See where those visitors who “bounce” have come from. It may give you some answers.

Email Marketing

There are very valuable statistics that come in from email marketing. Email marketing analytics can tell you how many people opened the email, how many visited your website from the email, and even which links in the email they clicked on. Over time you can analyze what your email readership found most interesting and clicked on. That way in the future, you know what will entice them.

Stay Updated

The way analytics are presented is constantly changing. Stay informed on how the information is presented and what it means for your website and what you should do with your content. Check out the video below for the latest way to read and interpret a Google Analytics report.

~Natalie

Short and Sweet- The Benefits of Tumblr

by My Web Writers

“Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything,” according to its website. So what makes Tumblr different from other social media?  It’s a combination of Facebook, Twitter and WordPress, and Tumblr can benefit your business.

Founded in 2007, Tumblr was created to “post text, photos, quotes, links, music and videos from your browser, phone, desktop, email or wherever you happen to be.” It takes things a step further because you can customize anything you post – from “colors to your theme’s HTML.” Tumblr also claims to be “the easiest way to blog.”

Getting started on Tumblr is easy, and it’s fairly simple to maintain, especially when compared to a blogging site like WordPress or BlogSpot. While there’s space for text and it’s considered a “blogging site”, it is still an image-driven social media site. You can make your page as simple or as fancy as you like.

As you will see from the examples below, each Tumblr page is different. Bloggers on Tumblr aren’t tied down to one layout. Tumblr gives you more freedom to be creative than other sites like Facebook or Pinterest.

Here are a few successful Tumblr pages that seem to have it right:

http://blog.anntaylor.com

Women’s fashion brand Ann Taylor has a simple, yet visually appealing Tumblr site. From the homepage alone there are more than a handful of options of directions to take when browsing through their blog. They make sure it isn’t all about fashion, but also sharing what people at the business have been up to. At the top, center of the screen are pictures from a dinner party they attended, and below that is a photo of a non-model wearing their brand who apparently won some sort of contest. They tastefully highlight their brand without over-selling it.

http://travelchannel.tumblr.com

The Travel Channel keeps their Tumblr home page short and sweet with very little text. They link to their other social media accounts.  The Travel Channel also knows the importance of connecting with its viewers. There is a section on their page called, “Posts We Like.” Imagine posting one of your travel photos and having it “liked” by the Travel Channel! They interact with viewers and take time to see what others have posted.

www.bijansabet.com

Bijan states this is his “personal blog,” but he actually uses it professionally, too. You can see in his “About” section that he lists where he works (with a link).  He also links his blog to his professional information on LinkedIn.   His blog gives him an avenue to share his personal thoughts and musings on a variety of topics, whether they are related to his business as a partner or not.  His blog can entice potential customers or help his current ones feel more connected to him.

Like other social media, Tumblr for business is all about the content. Whether you create your own content or hire web writers, Tumblr can benefit your business.

~Natalie

Writers – Organize Yourselves! Tools and Tips for Productivity

by My Web Writers

Ernest Hemingway once wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald,

“However am now going to write a swell novel – will not talk about it on acct. the greater ease of talking about it than writing it and consequent danger of doing same.”

As a professional writer, I completely understand how much easier it is to talk about writing than to actually do it. Whether it’s procrastination, an overwhelming feeling, distraction, or writer’s block holding you back, sometimes it’s hard to sit at the computer and start a project. Follow these tips for increasing your productivity.

Productive Writers Organize their Desks.

To improve your productivity, start with your workspace. If you know where everything is, you won’t waste time looking for things. Dr. Dennis Hensley, author of How To Manage Your Time  and director of the professional writing program at Taylor University, recommends purging your office of clutter.  When I interviewed him several years ago for Times Union,  Hensley said,

“Throw out outdated files. Give away books you’ve already read. Rip outdated materials off bulletin boards. Empty wastebaskets. Donate clothes that no longer fit. Gut the in-files. Pitch old manuals and outdated reference materials. You’ll be able to locate vital materials much faster.”

Productive Writers Track Projects and Deadlines.

You should organize your most important writing materials. The Internet offers some great organizational tools. You can scan your published manuscripts and store them on Dropbox , back up your computer’s hard drive or individual files on Carbonite, and access your works-in-progress anywhere using Google Docs.   Many e-mail providers also offer online calendars, and you can write to-do lists on sites like scribbless.com.

Microsoft Excel is great for keeping track of where you’ve submitted articles, who’s published them, and how much you’ve been paid. Google also has an online spreadsheet program.

Besides using technology to increase productivity, a simple calendar can help keep you organized. Author Sally Stuart wrote in her book, Sally Stuart’s Guide to Getting Published “I use a monthly calendar to set the daily priorities, and a yearly wall calendar to plot the big picture.”

Organized Writers Manage their Time.

Stuart also lists time-saving ideas in her book, including utilizing your answering machine, setting aside specific hours for your writing to decrease interruptions, and cutting out time-wasters, such as surfing the Web, reading mail and checking e-mail.

Dr. Hensley also suggests breaking up your projects into segments so they’re not as overwhelming.

“Like everyone, I have certain jobs I must do that I dread. I don’t look at the overall task, but at a lot of little projects. For example, in writing a book, I won’t tell myself that I have to produce 300 pages of finished manuscript. Instead, I’ll say that it is going to consist of 24 chapters and that each chapter is actually no more than one good-sized article. So, by doing one article every two weeks, I wind up with a book completed at the end of each year.”

If you still have too much to do, delegate minor tasks to others. Certain projects, like maintaining a presence on social media sites and updating your professional Web site, may warrant the help of an article writing service.

~Andrea