#my hand slipped once again and i ended up spending too much time with typography

[arsuf]

"You're… changing." LIES OF P (2023) 🦋

[edkentmediawebsites-blog]

5 Fast Editing Wins for Better Blog Posts

1. Spelling and grammar: get the basics right

All the shine in the world on your blog posts goes to waste if you don’t get the basics right. Typos, spelling and grammar slips are inevitable so it’s imperative you spot them and fix them.

Getting the basics right means actually reading through your posts a couple of times and correcting as you go. It’s super simple, but I dread to think the number of times I’ve spent ages writing a blog post and by the time I’ve got to the end just wanting to get the thing published and pushing it out onto a blog without really checking through it. It’ll only take you a minute. Don’t skimp on it.

Jetpack’s Spelling and Grammar module will spot any mistakes you’ve made. As a #1 top SEO Toronto agency we also keep these wins in mind.

For giving you a hand with spotting your embarrassing spelling mishaps, the Spelling and Grammar module built into Jetpack (and powered by After the Deadline) does a pretty good job. It’ll pick up spelling mishaps, grammar mistakes and make stylistic suggestions. Otherwise, I don’t really need to tell you how to read through your own work and check it for mistakes.

Top tip if English isn’t your first language  (or you’re not fluent): get a fluent speaker to look through your work for you. Friends and web acquaintances will be more than happy to take a quick look for you — and if you ask nicely enough they’ll probably do it for free. I’ve certainly done my fair share of proofing for non-native speakers over the last couple of years.

2. Use styling and paragraph breaks to highlight key points (and keep it readable)

The HTML for bold and italics are <strong> and <em> respectively. Strong being what you use to highlight your important points and em being short for emphasis — what you use to exaggerate your points.

How much emphasis you want to use is up to you, but I generally prefer italics for single words or very short phrases and then bold for longer clauses or whole sentences. Generally you’ll not want to bold more than one or two sections per paragraph. Perhaps three at the very most.

Smashing Magazine focuses immensely on typography and readability. One editorial policy is to highlight key points in bold.

On a post like this with multiple sub-headings and three or four paragraphs between each heading, you really don’t want to go overboard and two or three bold sections for the whole group of paragraphs is likely appropriate. It breaks up the text nicely and draws in the attention of readers scanning through what you’re saying. Smashing Magazine serves as an excellent example of how bold and italics can be used for ultimate blog post polish.

You can also highlight key points by using short sentences and paragraph breaks.

Frequent paragraph breaks are also going to improve readability. Baymard Institute reports on the optimal line length for your content, advocating between 50 and 75 characters per line on average:

“If a line of text is too long the reader’s eyes will have a hard time focusing on the text… In order to… energize your readers and keep them engaged, we suggest keeping your text within the range of 50-75 characters per line.”

Design, styling and line breaks all intersect. Nail all three and your readers are going to have a beautiful experience consuming your content.

3. Engage your readers with very exciting imagery

Adding interesting visuals is a great way of engaging readers and stopping them in their tracks when they’re skimming through your beautifully crafted post.

Thankfully, finding and crafting good imagery for your posts isn’t all that difficult. For a long time royalty-free stock imagery was pretty useless, but recently a bunch of free tools have made both finding images and creating them vastly easier for you.

Quality royalty free stock imagery is one half of the work. Unsplash and Little Visuals offer some really really high quality imagery free of charge for you to use wherever. Finding quality imagery is only one half of the work, though. You’ve got to make them engaging too.

Nathan Barry talks about how he creates “killer graphics” for his posts by taking those quality stock images and adding icons, text and sketches for additional visual interest:

Good graphics will go a long way towards making a blog post look interesting and high quality.

You can get 90% of the quality without spending hours in Photoshop, though. Pablo by Buffer will let you upload your image and then add some stylised text in about thirty seconds flat. Lose a little bit of quality but still get that engagement, get it done in seconds and get on with something else that’s going to level up your blog post.

I used Pablo to create the image you see above, with an image from Unsplash.

A personal touch can be really effective. Grab your notebook and a pen and write out a title or draw a diagram. Take a picture on your phone and you’ve got yourself a really unique graphic.

For a quick win adjust the brightness, crop and straighten.

If you’re willing to spend some serious time on drawings, you can even make highly sharable content in its own right with something hand drawn. Sean McCabe has some great blog posts about learning hand lettering. Even just a little practice can make some serious improvement.

4. Cut a quarter of what you’ve written

It’s easy to get obsessed with word counts. My post won’t be good unless it’s 1000 words.

This is the wrong way to think about it.  Think about your posts in terms of value created, not word count.

Cut the crap, keep the value. Quality beats quantity every single day. This will revolutionise the way you produce blog posts.

You don’t have to specifically cut a quarter of what you’ve written, but you want that kind of approach. Once you’ve finished writing, make a note of the word count and go through cutting out anything that is superfluous or isn’t directly providing value. You’ll probably have ended up cutting out a quarter.

5. Add quick takeaways

You create value with your posts by teaching your readers. “Actionable” takeaways — tips or techniques readers can actually implement — are an especially helpful way of putting what you’re preaching into practice.

Specifically highlighting quick takeaways throughout your post and then recapping again at the end will ensure  even those who scan your content are going to learn something .

Applying this to your posts as part of your regular editing process is simple, ensures readers get the most out of your content and will markedly improve your blogging.