How to Write a Great Post: 11 Tips

 

Claire Berlinski’s Trade Secrets
1. Don’t be boring. You know you’re being boring if your plate is still full of food but the person you’re speaking to has already finished eating. Should you notice this, shut up immediately and ask your interlocutor a question. It’s a conversation, not a lecture!

2. Nothing makes you seem more interesting than your genuine curiosity about the people to whom you’re talking. This is a secret so powerful that you can build a lifetime reputation as an interesting person around it without ever saying a single interesting thing. And you should be curious. There are more interesting people on Ricochet per square inch than anywhere else on the Internet, and they’re worth getting to know. Draw them out. I often use Ricochet to ask questions about which I’ve always been genuinely curious; it seems I’m usually not the only one to be curious about these questions.

3. This isn’t your doctoral dissertation. It’s the personal e-mail you dash off to your best friend after you see something in the news that just chaps your hide or leaves you convulsed with laughter. Write as if you’re writing to a friend you’ve known for ages–but make sure it’s your most interesting friend, not your most boring one.

4. A big huge trade secret: Contrary to the point above, but curiously simultaneously true, nothing good is dashed-off. What I write sounds dashed-off, but it takes a huge amount of editing to make it sound that way. Everything I write, including this, is edited, maybe a hundred times.

5. Go back and cut whatever you just wrote in half. Half of it was definitely unnecessary. I am not kidding you, it really was. I know it’s painful. I know it seems impossible. Just gird your loins and cut it in half. No exceptions.

6. Show, don’t tell. That’s the oldest writing advice in the book, and it’s good advice. Forget the big-message political post. Aristotle wrote that already. Tell us a story about something that happened to you, this morning, that illustrates what Aristotle wrote, (or what someone who wrote a footnote to Aristotle wrote).

7. Find stuff no one else has seen–don’t link to Drudge; everyone’s seen that already. Search academic journals, arcane government reports, the local newspapers in rural Pakistan. And especially, the news from your home town.

8. You can always test-drive a post on Facebook first to see if it’s interesting. If it generates a lot of comment there, it’s probably ready for prime time. If no one says anything, it may well be boring.

9. Don’t worry about writing something that generates comments. Writing toward that goal will only make your prose self-conscious. Write about what you genuinely care about.

10. Read the post out loud to your wife or husband, or cat, or dog, or parakeet. If they don’t want to talk about it, it’s probably boring. If they don’t laugh at the joke, it almost certainly wasn’t funny. It’s not them, it’s you.

11. Proofread one more time.

 

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