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Do Your Posts Have Pizzazz?
Take the Test and Find Out
Hopefully, your readers aren’t as bored as this dog lying on top of a bunch of worn out old books. Guaranteed, no Pizzazz in those books.
Doesn’t matter what your niche is, you’ve got a lot of competition. How do you get your posts read and then curated? How do you get your readers to continue reading? How are you standing out in the crowd of blog posts, stories, and articles?
It goes without saying that you must have good content. Content that’s timely, accurate, and informative. But with so much competition, “good” content isn’t enough.
They say your article needs to be grammatically correct. Demonstrate good sentence and paragraph structure. No misspelled words. And proper punctuation in place.
I don’t disagree, but I do know all those rules don’t engage your reader. (Well, except for those nasty Grammar Police who love to read posts with errors.) If you want to know more about writing without rules, you might like this story.
Your posts need Pizzazz! They need to snap, crackle, and pop.
Posts need emotion and feeling. They need juicy stories. Nice if they’re contrarian. I tell writers to write without following rules. That’s contrarian. I have entirely too many friends who like tea. That I prefer coffee when I’m with them is contrarian.
I’m actually a very contrarian person, but I won’t bore you with the details.
And speaking of details, do your posts have details? Details make your writing stand out. Getting emotion and feeling into your posts requires details.
Take this quick test.
Which sentence is more interesting and makes you want to know more?
Choose Number 1 or Number 2 below:
- We moved to Colorado last year.
- Last year, after our son Chris died of colon cancer, Eric and I threw out a lot of junk, packed up all the rest, put our two cats in their carriers, and left the Jenny Jump State Forest in New Jersey to drive back home to Denver.
Did you choose sentence 1 or sentence 2? I’m guessing you chose sentence 2.
Sentence one tells you nothing about me. No story, no emotion. No details. Just a couple facts.
The second sentence (which is a tad too long) tells you something sad, gives you my husband’s name, lets you know we have cats, and that we were living in NJ. Maybe you’d like to know why a state forest has the name “Jenny Jump?”
The second sentence specifies Denver instead of somewhere in Colorado. Even lets you know that our original home is Denver. And if you’re a curious person, you might wonder why Eric and MaryJo were in NJ in the first place.
Maybe you’d like to know a little more about Chris. You’ve probably guessed he was too young to die and feel sad. Perhaps you have a son and you think “Oh, no! What if my son were to die?” You might be imagining what it would be like to drive across the country with two cats.
A curious reader wants to know more about you. In the second sentence I’ve told you enough to leave you with questions. And it paints pictures you can see: sickness and death, a forest, packing to move, driving across the country, cats in carriers.
You’ve probably read a lot of articles, and you’ll probably agree with me that some of them just weren’t that great. Oh yes, they had good factual content and no grammatical errors. Why did you think, “Not such a good article”? Maybe you didn’t even finish it. It was ho-hum writing.
Ho-hum writing misses the emotion, the story, and the details that elicit pictures. Get those those elements in your post and I guarantee it will have pizzazz.
Ho-hum articles aren’t necessarily grammatically incorrect. Maybe no typos or misspelled words. They simply put readers to sleep. Boring. Oh, so boring.
But mistake-free writing isn’t how you beat the competition. Isn’t how you get readers to read to the end and want more. Readers will forgive a typo or an “its” when it should have been “it’s,” if your story makes them smile or cry or wonder. If they can “see” what you wrote.
So here’s to more pizzazz in your writing. I’ll be watching for it.
P.S. Yes, if you’re writing about yourself, writing with pizzazz requires you to be more vulnerable than ho-hum writing. Go for it anyway! I promise the sky won’t fall.
Watch for my forthcoming ebook, Oh Look, There’s a Squirrel and Other Stories.
In addition to writing about writing, I offer words of wisdom to adult ADHDers and to folks who are adopted. I am both. (Many adopted folks have ADHD, often caused by trauma at birth.)
You’ll find me at LivingWithAdoption.com. For a list of common adoption challenges, grab my free Adoption Checklist for Women: 25 Life Issues.
Given raging ADHD, it’s no surprise that focus does not come to me easily! In addition to adoption and ADHD, I also write random stories from my life, what I’ve observed, what’s in the news, about writing and editing, anything that tickles my fancy.
For a Black Lives Matter from a white perspective, see my stories For White Folks from an Old Gray-Haired White Woman with Arthritis. And Teaching Kindergarten at an all-Black school.
You might also like musings on Staying at Home because of COVID 19: The Good, The Bad, and the Not So Ugly.