How Smart is Your Writing?

I’ll be honest with you.  8 years of university studies have slaughtered my writing ability.  Oh, I can whip up an academic paper in a couple of hours that would make your head swim with all its fancy footnotes.  But I’m not writing for professors - even though I do get graded in the blogosphere.  And so do you.

So how do you make your writing shine without sounding like a lecture?  It’s a lesson I’m starting to learn as I wean myself off of academia and start writing to the average person and not “above” them.

Here are a few of the things I’ve found out that can help.

1. Grade your writing - You can use the writing sample analyzer here to see what “grade level” your writing is at.  Ideally you should write for someone with a reading level of 8th grade (14-15 years old), which means your score on the test above should be around 60-70.

2. Write with color - Don’t be afraid to sprinkle in some good, hard-hitting words that make your ideas come to life.  Tell a story, share a point of view, or offer advice, but do it descriptively!  Even something as direct and simple as “growing tomatoes” can be made interesting.  Here’s an example:

Grow juicy, fat tomatoes in your garden this year with the Tomatonator!  Imagine sinking your teeth into thick, luscious tomato slices as big as steaks.

Now if that doesn’t have you salivating for a hamburger with a big slab of tomato covering it, I don’t know what will!

3. Sprinkle in keywords - This is difficult for many people to do when writing for the web.  They want to use targeted keywords that attract people and search engines to their site, but they don’t want to use too many for fear of spamming - and they don’t want their writing to sound bland and boring.

Fortunately there are lots of online tools that can help you find related keywords.  Try www.wordpot.com for free - it even shows you how popular that keyword is across several months.  Click on any word to narrow it down even more.

Hopefully this article has given you some ideas on how to write smarter without working harder.  And in case you’re curious, it turns out that this blog post can be read easily enough by a fifth grader, and has a “fog score” of just slightly over “normal English”.  I feel smarter already!

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