If you’re a blogger who isn’t good at writing or maybe you just don’t have that “edge” in your vocabulary and you feel intimidated, this post is for you. Before I get into my tip, I want to recommend Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style” to every writer. It changed my life in college and certainly helped me go from being a work holding retailer to the writer and teacher I am today. Ok, back to front: I talked in my podcast last week about “blogging what you know.” So often we get caught up in wanting to write on stuff we just heard about or even stuff we think we “ought” to know about. The fact of the matter is that when we jump ahead of our own learning curve, our audience can tell and it is usually a turn-off. Vocabulary is a classic example of this. We may want really bad to sound like pros in a given field by using vocabulary unknown to us. This put is in the place of a) being irrelevant to those (like us) who don’t understand the words -or- 2) looking stupid to people who do understand the words. How can we sound smart and avoid these two problems? I have a method.
I used to look up words I didn’t know and put them on 3×5 cards in college. When it was paper time, I whipped out those “million dollar words” and used them in my sentences. Now, the key element here is that I looked them up first and knew what they meant before I used them. As a blogger, you are always reading: items on your feed, research and news items … why not open a file on your desktop and paste those unknown or pretty words in there. It can be like your box of “million dollar words” that can theoretically set you apart from the rest of the multi-million bloggers out there writing at a relatively low academic level.
Just a thought!
