What Website Writers Can Learn from a Famous Fiction Writer

Six Essential Web Writing Tips from the Author of the Stephanie Plum Series

Website writing, despite its quirks, is still a lot like writing fiction. The idea behind website writing is "quantity more than quality". Unfortunately, this type of writing does not gain a lot of respect from readers. To make things worse, many web writers conform too much to the rules of Search Engine Optimization. The resulting article eventually turns into something a robot, instead of a human, would rather read.

Janet Evanovich, in her book "How I Write", points out six important writing rules which I think will benefit website writers. Even if you do not aim to be famous, but you are serious with your craft, you should check out these tips, add them to your writing arsenal, and take them to heart.

SHOWING VS. TELLING

If you are going to tell a story, show instead of tell. Telling is simply stating what happened. Telling is when you use nouns and mostly the "be" verbs. Showing is when you describe with adjectives and strong "moving" verbs. People will likely be more interested to read your stuff if you could create colors and shapes and animation in the readers' mind. The more they can picture a story in an article, the more they will read.

GRAMMAR AND VOCABULARY

It goes without saying that you can never be a true writer if your grammar is bad and your vocabulary is poor. Writing is a game of language. Even if you are not a gifted communicator, you can still learn to improve your communicating skills as you go along your writing career. Wouldn't you be embarrassed if your readers tried very hard to understand what you were trying to say in your writing? Or if you were trying to say currency, but you wrote currently? I recommend getting you a copy of Bill Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words (A Writer's Guide to Getting It Right). This is where I learned the difference between "egoism" and "egotism".

SUBJECT KNOWLEDGE