OnlineFreelance.com

With this article we will start a series of publications with hints for article writers.

There is one thing that most of the beginner writers don’t want to accept — more work, less creativity! You need to be creative only if you are asked to. 99% (okay maybe 90%) of the buyers actually don’t need imagination. If you need to write a large number of articles most probably the ideas will be borrowed from other websites. The buyer sees something he likes and he needs to get a similar article for his website. So there is no need to bother with inventing something new. The facts will always be the same: this law is specified in this part of the Criminal Code, this car has this air conditioning installed and this hotel is rated with five stars. Everything you need is to spice up the existing document and facts. Before you start writing an article it is better to search the web for some similar articles. This will help you with choosing the style for your article and definitely help you with some additional ideas. Your best friend in most of the cases will be Wikipedia. Usually my articles consist of 40-70% original article + 20-50% Wikipedia facts and related ideas + 10% of my own ideas and thoughts about the subject. The result — an article where buyer sees the facts, something he liked in the previous article and most important some new thoughts. Of course this strategy helps not in every case, but it works for any large project. And… oh yeah this article is completely original.

Another common problem is the level of English. The best solution is to write simple. A large part of the web comes from non-English speaking countries, so it is best to focus on some plain and understandable English if possible. Try to avoid some complex sentence structures and if there is a choice between a simple word and a specific term choose the simple word. Of course it doesn’t mean that you need to write in monkey English.

As for the large projects, there is a thing that beginners usually don’t believe in: it is actually very hard to write big amounts of articles. So if you are negotiating a big project don’t be a hero and promise to finish everything in one day, better take some more time. I manage to write not more than 8-10 500 word articles (this article is a 500 word one) per day and this is very hard. It is hard to maintain a good writing tempo; it is hard to generate new ideas and thoughts starting from like article number six; it is hard to avoid mistakes when you are tired. If you can write a 500 word article in 30 minutes, it doesn’t mean that you will be able to handle 10 articles in 5 hours. It will most probably take like 10-12 hours with breaks. So in every case it is always better to split large projects into smaller parts.

Tags: beginner, english, writing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 12:37 and is filed under writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.