Every now and then, I run a workshop on making blog content interesting at a local high school. The workshop always kicks off with a session on generating ideas for blog posts – though of course the ideas apply to all writing.
Here are thoughts on how to generate content ideas that I share (with the addition of some that have been shared by participants over the years):
I’m on record as saying that I think the most important thing to do in writing is structuring your text – and that grammar is something that people can worry about once they have organised their thoughts.
I am aware, though, that that is an easy thing to say when you are writing in your mother tongue. In that environment, we all have an innate understanding of how our language works, and what feels wrong and what feels right.
But for people who need to write in a second or third language (as so many people are in our English-dominated world), fear of getting things wrong can be confidence-sapping and inhibiting.
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My working life consists of words.
Writing them, editing them, loving them.
And yet, words themselves are not as important as the places where they fit.
Here’s the thing: faced with an editing job, I hope for one thing, and one thing only. And that is not that the writer has a good grasp of grammar and spelling.
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Long ago, at school, there was an English lesson about how and where to break text into paragraphs.
As I remember it, we were taught that that one thought or subject should be contained within the same paragraph.
The wonderful Grammar Girl agrees. She says:
Paragraphs represent ideas, and ideas come in many sizes. The most important point should be at the beginning of a paragraph — often, that point is called a topic sentence — and you use the rest of the paragraph to develop the point further.
