The Write Blog

Varying sentence length in your writing sets a lot more than the tone or rhythm. It allows you to set up and emphasize points.

Consider this:

Many people consider New York a place they’d rather visit than reside in because of its reputation as being the city that never sleeps. New York, however, is a vibrant city divided into boroughs that are all cities within themselves. There’s something for everyone in this expansive city.

Meh. It’s pretty bland – not only because of its weak word choices, but because the sentences are all roughly the same length. Its dull tone becomes lulling. Most people, including the author, wouldn’t think twice to skip it.

Let’s try this:

New York. The city that never sleeps. Outsiders may find it difficult to image living in the middle of the bustling Big Apple. But who wouldn’t want to live in a city that houses beaches, historical monuments, and stellar shopping?

I picked a pretty boring subject matter on purpose to illustrate just how crucial varying sentence lengths could be. Once I captured the reader’s attention with a short sentence, I gradually increased my sentence length to encourage the reader to keep reading. I broke up two longer sentences with a shorter one.

There’s no pattern or set of rules to follow, but you should always keep in mind the basics. You don’t want to write only in short sentences or they lose their punch and become disruptive to the reader. Use longer sentences to establish tone and comfort, or to inform readers about something.

By varying the lengths of your sentences, your audience will pick up on all the nuances that you’ve poured into your writing. It just makes reading more fun.

Continuing my theme from a previous post about professional blogs, I want to talk a little bit about using your blog as a networking tool. So you’ve started your blog – now what? Learning how to navigate through the blogosphere is essential to building a solid readership and increasing your web visibility.

First, enroll in a blog search engine. These search engines are basically large indexes that encompass the blogging world, making it easy for readers to search for useful blogs in any given category. There are a lot of search engines out there, and most are free, so be sure to put your blog’s url in as many directories as possible. To get you started, some of the more popular blog search engines include www.technorati.com, www.blogsearchengine.com, www.blogsearch.google.com, www.icerocket.com, and www.blogdigger.com.

Start frequenting other blogs and leaving comments. Get your face out there – read other blogs (preferably in the same or similar genre as your own) and comment! Starting a rapport with other bloggers is essential to your blog’s health. Once you increase your visibility with these bloggers, you can start a relationship by asking them to link to your site, and vice-versa. Remember, just like a new friendship, these relationships take time to build.

While you’re at it, start a blogroll, a list of other blogs and websites that you find interesting. The links in your blogroll should direct readers to useful or similar blogs to your own – think of it as your blog’s “Recommended Reading” list. Check your specific blogging system to find out how to start a blogroll.

Once you start networking among other bloggers, use trackbacks frequently. Now, what’s a trackback? A trackback sends a message from your server to another blogger’s server every time you reference one of their posts on your site. Trackbacks are great tools to use because, if that blogger supports trackbacks, a link to your blog will be added to their site every time you reference them. Every blogging system has different rules and requirements for trackbacks, so a little research may be required before getting started.

For extra points, install buttons to social bookmarking sites on your blog. This encourages readers to recommend their favorite posts to others. Make it easy for your readers to recommend your particularly interesting articles by installing del.icio.us, digg, reddit, and furl buttons directly on your site. These social bookmarking sites can increase traffic to your blog exponentially if you get a large enough following.

In order to have an effective blog, someone out there needs to be reading it! Increasing your web visibility may take a little time and some savvy research skills, but once you get the hang of the new web 2.0, the benefits will be invaluable to the life of your blog.

I’m not afraid to admit that I’ve been a little behind the curve when it comes to the whole dotcom thing. I wasn’t the first on the facebook bandwagon, and I’m still trying to wrap my head around the concept of digg and others like it. But with the emergence of more and more blogs, wikis, and social networks, it’s impossible to escape this new Web 2.0 society.

But what, exactly, is Web 2.0? Some argue that it’s a marketing buzzword coined by the industry while others disagree. Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media and the man attributed with coining the term Web 2.0, describes it as “the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and the attempt to understand the rules for success on that platform.”

In layman’s terms, Web 2.0 encourages users to collaborate creatively and share everything from ideas to information. It’s not actually that the technology of the web has changed; rather we are learning to use it in a more social and mutually beneficial way. That’s why blogs run rampant on the web, and if you’re not involved in some sort of online social network, you obviously live in the Stone Age.

Terms like search engine optimizing, tagging, wikis, and the like are important to know in order to grasp a full understanding of the new and improved World Wide Web. Familiarizing yourself with these terms will help you use the web to your full advantage whether your goal is to generate more hits to your website or simply blog your heart out.

For a full explanation of Tim O’Reilly’s take on Web 2.0, click here.

Many businesses are turning to blogs to provide fresh content for regular readers, enhance their web visibility, and to ultimately drive business back to their website. All successful blogs have a few things in common, so keep these tips in mind when developing your business’ blog:

1. Make it Interesting

Gain a loyal readership by keeping readers interested. Your blog shouldn’t read like a press release, talking about how great your business is, your new products and services, etc. Instead, give readers relevant content: industry news, tips, “Top 10” lists, and professional advice. Remember, you want to make this relevant to the reader – this keeps readers visiting your website regularly, and (hopefully) passing along your blog information to others.

2. Keep Focused

Pick a blog topic and stay with it. If you have, say, a knitting blog, make sure all of your posts are relevant to knitting and not something else (like tips on how to unclog the sink). Also, a professional blog is not the place to post pictures of your dog, a long diatribe about your favorite T.V. program, or a diary-style entry about your date last night. This can kill your credibility and bore readers.

3. Obey the Rules of Grammar

Remember, professional blogs are about establishing your credibility, not the place to experiment with sTrAnGe CaPitAliZaTioN. So check your spelling, avoid too-casual slang, and be sure that your blog is as professional as your business.

4. Post Steadily

Establish a reasonable timeline for updating your blog and make sure to follow it. There’s no use in posting 50 blogs in a month only to ignore your blog for a few weeks. The goal of a blog is to keep people coming back. Don’t overwhelm them with too much information, but keep a steady stream of content and give them a reason to check back regularly.

5. Don’t Ignore Readers

If you allow comments on your site, always be sure to respond to direct questions within the comments. Make your readers feel like their thoughts and opinions matter by responding promptly and graciously.

Having to choose between that and which is one of those tricky little grammar rules that trips me up constantly as I write.

So after looking this up one last time, here are the definitive usage guidelines:

1. That

That is used solely in restrictive clauses, meaning it introduces specific, essential information in a sentence. As a general rule of thumb, that is usually used in sentences without commas. For example:

The cat that was on the porch slept all day.
The shoes that she bought yesterday were very expensive.

Both of these sentences contain restrictive dependent clauses, giving us specific information about what is happening. The first sentence “restricts” the subject “cat.” It is used to separate the cat on the porch from other cats that may be in the bedroom or on top of the refrigerator. Put another way, you could say that “only the cat on the porch slept all day.”

Same scenario in the second sentence, where that restricts the shoes she bought to yesterday only, and doesn’t include any of the shoes she may have bought on any other day.

2. Which

Which is used to introduce a non-restrictive clause, a clause that gives us extra information that may be interesting or incidental but does not define the subject. A fun way to remember this: which clauses can “fly away like a witch,” meaning they can be cut from the sentence without changing the meaning. In order to form a restrictive clause, use which and insert two commas around the clause.

The cat, which was on the porch, slept all day.

This sentence tells us essentially the same thing, a cat is sleeping, with one key difference: the cat just happened to be on the porch. Adding the non-restrictive clause gives us extra information about the cat – that he was on the porch – which does not alter the meaning of the sentence, “the cat slept all day.” Notice the commas that bracket off this new information.

And you can reconstruct the form in the second example in the same way:

The shoes, which she bought yesterday, were very expensive.

The reader knows that someone bought shoes; the fact that she bought the shoes yesterday is just an extra piece of information bracketed off from the rest of the sentence. Again, we have commas separating the non-restrictive clause from the rest of the sentence.

As a general note, that can NEVER be used in a non-restrictive clause. To say “The cat, that was on the porch, slept all day,” is incorrect because of the comma usage.

Also, when speaking of people, always use who in place of that or which.

3. Combining the Two

Don’t be afraid to combine that and which once you have the correct usage. For example:

The shoes that she bought yesterday, which she purchased for $500, were very chic.