Ernest Hemingway’s writing tips for bloggers
“Throughout his career as a writer,” says Larry W. Phillips in Ernest Hemingway on Writing, “Hemingway maintained that it was bad luck to talk about writing.” Nevertheless the tips Phillips condensed into his book would be applicable to good blog writing too:
1. Start with the simplest things
2. Boil it down
3. Know what to leave out
4. Write the tip of the ice-berg, leave the rest under the water
5. Watch what happens today
6. Write what you see
7. Listen completely
8. Write when there is something you know, and not before
9. Look at words as if seeing them for the first time
10. Use the most conventional punctuation you can
11. Ditch the dictionary
12. Distrust adjectives
13. Learn to write a simple declarative sentence
14. Tell a story in six words
15. Write poetry into prose
16. Read everything so you know what you need to beat
17. Don’t try to beat Shakespeare
18. Accept that writing is something you can never do as well as it can be done
19. Go fishing in summer
20. Don’t drink when you’re writing
21. Finish what you start
22. Don’t worry. You’ve written before and you will write again
23. Forget posterity. Think only of writing truly
24. Write as well as you can with no eye on the market
25. Write clearly – and people will know if you are being true
26. Just write the truest sentence that you know
27. Remember that nobody really knows or understands the secret
Discovered via Confident Writing. Picture courtesy Intersection
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Peter. Flemish, European, aid worker, blogger, expeditioner, sailor, traveller, husband, father, friend, nutcase. Not necessarily in that order. (
The first comment… comes from me.
Blogs are the new ‘corporate website’… I am not sure there is space for both. In theory, there is, but if well done, a blog can ‘exterminate’ a corporate website.
J.
Excellent post, thanks!
I am still trying to convince the public information people that blogs are GOOD! I will forward them this post!
My web guys will have a real go at this post!
It would also be interesting to see some graphs over period of time.. How they evolved as the blog got “to be known”…
Thanks, Lucy… Think this is a good idea!
Peter
We must not keep quite at this moment. The situation in Iran is getting worse by the minute. The events happening in Iran are really sad. I really hope that Iran’s people get back there freedom of speech and democracy.
I’m very happy to see that bloggers all over the world are blogging about this issue to raise awareness. Twitter is also doing a great job.
Iranian people, we are with you.
Thanks for explaining clearly about twitter. Keep posting.
Nice posting. Actually I am trying to increase visitor of my blog. So this article help me lot.
You are doing a good work here may the good Lord continue to grant you good health.
Please am interested to learn how to blog,please me,www.twitter.com/worldcupza
WOW,You’ve tons of good article in your site man….but i wonder why there is no ads on your blog?
You must have at least few right?
If I would blog for money, I would have gone broke or mad a long time ago.
I only have a few text-link ads at the bottom left sidebar.
Peter
Thanks to admin, great posting
very thankful tips i found about tweeting, thanks
There’s a lot of interesting information in that report. It sounds like they really did some homework to come up with those numbers.
“8. Write when there is something you know, and not before”
Totally disagree with that one. Some of the best writing is born from doubt.
Hacking became easy now
everybody are trying to hack something they want.
Thank you for posting this. As a Technotard it is information like this that helps me learn and understand the complexities of Blogging. Keep up the good work.
Microsoft Bing would be the closet competitor of Google. but i still use Google because it shows more relevant results on the serp.
great information,Good post there mate.
Nice post I like reading the reviews
Blogging Tips
I love wordpress myself, and cannot seem to get into any other platform!
i have been evaluating the search results of Microsoft Bing compared to Google and they are comparable. Bing gives almost the same relevant search results just like Google.
I’ve used Wordpress.com, Blogger and Movable Type. Of all of them, Wordpress is definitely the most fun to use.
However, there is one benefit to using Blogger than many of the other sites don’t have: They let you earn money from advertising.
I know this is a non-profit blog, but earning money is one of the reasons I stick with blogger when I want to create a free website.
But I believe a Wordpress.org site hosted on a rented server can be altered to earn an income. Not 100% sure though.
Nonetheless, very good tips you have here.
@Jacob,
Thanks for your comments.
Indeed, WordPress.com (the hosted version of WordPress – on a rented server as you describe it) does not allow advertising.
WordPress.org (the selfhosted version) allows you to do anything, so do Tumblr, Typepad, Movable Type (and Blogger of course).
Peter
Bing search engine gives almost the same search results as Google. Looks like Google will now have a tough competition when it comes to search engine technology.
Good article. perhaps we can lok forward to some videos in the future?
@TwitterTricks:
if only I had time!
P.
wow, wonderful images. it is great to see. i think it is photoshoped, but it’s amazing .
no photoshop. just basic cropping and highlighting contrast…
Peter
No offense or anything, but your site is filled with many things that kind of slow down the loading. Just a friendly hint:
Too many widgets and pictures=Too few viewers
@ATP
If it were you, where would you suggest to make changes?
Is it slow at your end? Over here the home page is 0.5 Mbyte and loads in 6 seconds flat. There are no widgets whatsoever. All images should be cached.
tnx–Peter
@ATP..
oops sorry. there is a widget… The only widget there is, is the ‘Related posts’ at the bottom of each single post…
P.
Here’s an article helping to explain PageRank if anyone is interested in reading more into it.
Tracking your site is really important ,if you want to know your sources people linking to you +You get new ideas by tracking your site so you start building new source.
Sincerely,
Adeel
Age 16
Along with great details, what I like about Google analytics is the simplicity
Blogs are an easy way of earning cash as well as traffic to your site only if done in a tactful way
http://tinyurl.com/y9lr3le
Bing does give search results much like Google but i would have to say that Google still gives more relevant search results
Great article. Very helpful information. Thankyou.
Great tips! Now what about pinging your blog and blog posts? I’ve had my blog Journey to Independence for quite a while now and would like to know how pinging my blog posts will do me any good. I read a lot of tips on how to ping and what plug-ins one can use but none of them that says what the exact benefits of pinging is.
Andy,
This would be an interesting topic to write a post about.
Apart from the advantage of pinging search engines/aggregators, the blog-to-blog pinging seems only a mechanism to “network socially amongst bloggers”:
If blog A pings blog B, this means nothing more than B advising A of an update moreso “reminding of its existence”…
I think the only real (and honest) use of blog-to-blog pinging is as WordPress has implemented it (maybe others too, but am the most familiar with WordPress’ implementation):
for each post, I can automatically (and manually) ping other URLs to advise them I have referred to them in a link, within my post.
As a ‘thank you’, the other blogs can include that ping (with your URL) within the comments of the “referred to” post.
Does that make sense?
Peter
I like twitter, it’s the best tool to drive traffic to my website.
Twitter is really phenomenal, using it right will really help boosts your traffic and loyal readers if you’re lucky
Good tips on promoting blog posts on twitter.. making the tweet interesting is a good idea. Will try it out!
This is so great to see the story of the blog here through the interview. It makes me think that I promised to go back and blog for you
What I most liked about this experience is the natural flow of investment and entusiasme of different people at different times that ensured the growth of the blog and made us all learn together. The new site is excellent. I like how it values the authors while keeping the “whole” of the program evident. Great job! And proud to be part of tyhe story!
Thanks Peter to give us an opportunity to reflect upon and document a journey the team took in the last couple of years! An experience I hope will inspire others.
a nice post and thanks for visiting my blog, like to hear more from you
i love to Twitter my day to day activities to my friends and followers. Twitter is much better than blogging because it is direct to the point and does not require you to type so many unnecessary words.
1h
My take on this: you get what you pay for. If something is critical to what I do, I don’t use a free service. If I don’t have a choice (e.g. in the case of Twitter), I ensure that I have fallback plans — e.g. I am now getting a (paid!)subscription for Backupify.
I don’t see how we have any ‘rights’ when it comes to free services. The only right you have is to leave e.g. Yahoo and go to the competitor (who you might need to pay for), which will impact Yahoo’s bottom line because they will get fewer clicks. You can try to influence them, but rights, no.
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