Part Six — How to Format and Schedule a Blog Post     Why Format? A blog post is not a book. It’s not an article. It’s not even an essay. An essay has one main purpose — to communicate to the reader the point the writer wants to make. This could be informing, changing an opinion, teaching a topic, or sharing an anecdote.    But a blog post has many purposes in addition to its content. Yes, it does the same things as an essay but it has a multitude of different ways to convey information in the fastest, most efficient way possible, not all of them text-based. A…

Part Five — How to Write a Blog Post 1. Why write a blog? — Your Purpose Your purpose informs and directs everything you write, from the material you include, to your style, voice and content.   Once you figure out WHY you want to write it, you’ll be well on the way to knowing what you want to write about. Your Purpose is a through-line that ties everything together, giving you a roadmap which lets you see what fits and what doesn’t.  But as long as you’re missing this key ingredient of Purpose, your blog will continue to be disjointed, scattered and lacking in cohesion.   Defining your Purpose…

The personal essay is an autobiographical narrative or story relating a significant personal experience that shaped or changed the writer. A good one can inspire readers and move them to ask questions or take action.   The purpose of a personal essay is to introduce the writer to readers. It presents the writer as a personality, a character in a factually accurate narrative. Personal essays entertain and engage the reader with attention to literary style and technique. They’re based on truth, and they illustrate the writer’s outlook through the use of personal experiences and conclusions. Readers want to know and understand who the writer really is, not just the events that…

Part Three — The  Informal Essay The informal essay is characterized by the personal element — self-revelation, individual tastes and experiences, confidential manner, humour, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty. Its main departure from formal essays is its use of personal pronouns, using inclusive references to I, we, or you, where a formal essay tends to be more distanced and remote. In informal writing, we create a direct contact between ourselves and the reader.    Informal essays are much more personal than the formal essay. Informal essays mean we can express our personal opinion rather than simply presenting the facts. We’ll still include some facts, but we’ll be offering our…

Part Two — The Formal Essay For the month of July, we’re concentrating on a series about creating short pieces that engage and impact the reader. Last week we covered the Implied Contract between writer and reader and how it determines what we write.    This week, we’ll dive a little deeper into how to write them.   What is an Essay?   The structural basis of effective short pieces is the essay. In school, we learned the basics of essay writing, but in most cases, we couldn’t see the point of learning it. It wasn’t something we thought we’d ever use. But nowadays, everyone communicates online, so the more…

Part One — The Implied Contract Last year, I wrote a post on How to Focus a Blog Post, but since then, I’ve received a number of further questions, so it seems there are more answers to be explored.   For the month of July, I’ll be concentrating on a series about creating short pieces that engage and impact the reader. We’ll cover the implied contract between writer and reader and how it determines what you write, the essay structure and how it applies to short stories, personal memoirs and blog posts, and we’ll cover blog posts and the proper way to present an argument. We’ll go through a series…

Deus Ex Machina Last week’s post pointed out that little coincidental changes can alter the entire trajectory of a story. But at what point does coincidence become “deus ex machina” — defined by the Oxford dictionary as, “an unexpected power or event saving a seemingly hopeless situation, especially as a contrived plot device in a play or novel”?   The key here is the word “contrived”. Last week, I said, “Our lives hinge on these coincidences.”   But herein lies a problem for writers. We can’t use them. We can’t dump a convenient coincidence into our story whenever we need something to change. We can’t simply insert a character or…

This article comes out of a conversation I had with a writer who couldn’t decide what should go into two related scenes:   Dor: I’ve got two scenes fighting with each other. So not nice! Bev: What’s the key point in each scene? How can you differentiate the scenes to accentuate the point? Dor: It’s a sequence of two scenes as a big storm is about to hit. So I’m mostly combing for timeline consistency. Two characters, one makes a suggestion and the other resists. Then in the second scene (a few beats later in the time line) the other character takes the bait and goes overboard with the suggestion.…