Alexander and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad post.

Wow. You’re actually reading this? I had contemplated simply filling this post with gibberish because I didn’t think anyone would read it. Blah blah blah qwertyuiop. I thought you would take one look and go straight back to google. They say we only have 3 seconds to capture the user’s attention when they land on our page. I didn’t think this post would need 2 and a half of them. Anyway, as this is just  my 2nd post, rather than starting with how to write amazing, eloquent, persuasive texts, I though a more achievable and reasonable goal would be to understand how to write a post that isn`t simply awful. And in order to learn how to write a post that isn’t awful, I thought I would write one that is. You see, although writing well can be difficult, writing terribly seems pretty easy. Which is good because we should be able to avoid some of the most obvious errors. And they’re fairly obvious even to those without much experience in writing, like me. For starters, don’t include everything in one giant block of text. Thats bad enough on its own but when its done with extremely long sentences that just seem to run on forever and repeat themselves and go on for a very long time and say the same thing over and over without punctuation then I’m surprised you haven’t closed this window yet. No indentation, no structure, no bold text to highlight important passages, no bullet points that would have made this sentence and list easier to read and more pleasing to the eye. Not even an image. Too many small sentences. All lined up. Means no variation. And a monotonous tone.   It becomes boring. After a while. This post is simply terrible and has broken neerly evry rule imageneable. There are many negatives. Lots of superfluous, surplus, redundant, unneeded, spare and extra words. But there are also a few positives. Maybe, depsite the flaws, you were brought in by the peculiar title. Maybe, despite the immediate and obvious defect of being a seemingly unending and unappealing giant chunk of text, it is simply so far removed from your expectations that curiosity got the better of you and you had to keep reading? Most of the time writing isn’t maths or physics. There’s no direct x + y = a good piece of writing. No concrete laws governing it all.  Rules and templates can help. But its more x + y  approximates good writing. Yes, some level of consistency, structure and predictability is needed, of course. Or else our text is just a bunch of random words. Dog. Purple. Gingerbread. But it’s only in an accountant’s report or scientific journal where you want pure reason and lists. So, in summing up, having a basic layout, with something interesting to say, along with logical structure, and a dash of creativity, all that  goes a very long way to improving our writing. Avoid the obvious mistakes… and you’re already a fair way down the path of creating a decent post. Anyway, hopefully you’ve learnt a few things from this post. I think I have…