write like you talk, it’s that easy

If everyone who’s ever sat through an English class could write, I’d be out of a job.

I don’t think everyone who claims to be a writer actually is a writer. Now that my disclaimers-slash-prejudices are out of the way upfront, let me say that I love it when non-writers start writing as long as they are open to constructive criticism.

You have a blog because you want to share your chocolatier goodness with the world, but you know more about truffles than sentence structure? No worries. At all. Just write like you talk, like you’re having an actual conversation about chocolate, and you’re halfway to a growing an enthusiastic readership even if half of them are allergic.

Some tips for the not-a-writer writer:

1. Keep it simple. Stop with the flowery prose. It’s.a.blog
2. Use one word instead of six whenever that one word says the exact same thing as that stupid group of six
3. If it’s a drunk-post, please share that with your readers sometime around your third cocktail. It reads funnier that way, trust me
4. Keep a thesaurus handy, but don’t let it move in with you. And for God’s sake, don’t booty call it. For example:
5. If it’s taking you too long to find the perfect fancy word, the word you’re looking for is too fancy. No one even uses the word compatriot anymore. Is he your friend or what? Use “friend”
6. Step away from the word “emanate”. It doesn’t mean what you think it means
7. Though Sarah Palin considers this a crime punishable by death, people will indeed judge you on grammar and spelling unless they love you too much to care. Good luck getting those people to actually read your blog
8. Show off your sense of humor if you have one. If you don’t have a sense of humor, please pick one up on the way home to your kids who probably hate you
9. Save the manifestos for your second career as a violent government anarchist. Thousand-word essays are reserved for, well, not for us. When we’re blogging away our crazy, we can do that most easily in 350-or-fewer-word bits and pieces
10. Write what you know. You knew that already

Your own tip or, preferably, favorite cocktail in comments…