Why great blog posts deserve D's in English class

Everything they taught us in school about writing is wrong.

Ok, maybe it's not wrong, by any technical measure.  But for blogging, it's certainly not right.  Pen an essay worthy of an "A" in high school, maybe even in a general-education college English class, and be ready for it to tank faster than you can say coordinating conjunction.

The problem is, safe writing is rewarded at every level of school (English majors excepted, perhaps).  English class taught us to write well-organized prose that offends no one.  What it didn't teach us is that when you protect your writing against all manner of objections, when you cut off any possibility of someone's disagreeing with you, your writing becomes flacid and boring.  Worse, it becomes completely unremarkable.

Remarkable stuff spreads.  If you've read any Seth Godin, you already know this.  But an interesting thing I've noticed about blog posts is that they don't have to be all that remarkable to be shared.  All they have to do is seem remarkable.  Granted, you had better come up with something truly good every once in a while, but in between writing those gems, at least endow your other posts with some semblance of special-ness.

Most of the writing that kills any appearance of being significant falls under two categories: wordiness, and safe writing.

Wordiness. Blog readers have notoriously short attention spans.  Most of them will read only your title to decide whether your post is any good and worth tweeting about.  If you hit the few that make it past the title with a lengthy, well-constructed introduction, they're done.  Get right to the point, or write a one-sentence intro that draws the reader in.

Once they're in, keep things short.  Short sentences, short paragraphs.  Big blocks of text cause readers to skim and then leave.  Haven't you, faced with a half-screen paragraph when you have many more blogs to read, done this recently?

Safe writing. Brian Clark calls it hedging.  Call it whatever you want, except compelling.  Every time you write "I think" or "in my opinion," your writing suffers.  We know it's what you think.  We read your blog because we like reading what you think.  If we wanted bulletproof facts, we'd read Wikipedia.

By the same token, don't expect many tweets or Facebook shares about a post telling readers that a balanced diet is the way to health.  Sure, nobody can disagree with that one.  But nobody's emailing it to their friends either.  People share stuff they love and stuff they hate; anything "balanced" is neither.

In addition to No Meat Athlete, I co-write the True/Slant blog Running Shorts with Megan from Runner's Kitchen.  Since readers there aren't quite as loyal, and are definitely more critical than No Meat Athlete readers, it's always tempting to write safely there.  But the posts that do well aren't the safe ones.  For example, in a particularly pissed-off moment I wrote a post called If you're fat, Wii Fit isn't It.  I took a side; some people liked it, a lot of people hated it (and said so).  But it got picked up by another online news outlet and sent more traffic than any other post I've written there has gotten.

If you worry about negative comments, you've got to get over it.  The occasional negative comments is a sign that your writing is touching people, a sign you're actually doing something with your writing.  Wear it like a badge of honor.

Next time you're ready to publish a post, imagine you're about to turn it in to your English teacher.  If he or she would love it, start over.