It sounded easy too. But it wasn’t. Not only was it forcing me to focus on a particular letter and choose a word, I had to somehow tie it into marketing. So I started with a piece of fruit, evolved into large animals, and ended it all with an ice resurfacing machine.
And what happened? I stretched my mind and went waaaay out of the box.
The good folks running the challenge recommended keeping posts short. I was determined to conquer that suggestion, since I found that my blogs had started going beyond 600 words. Sometimes I wrote over 700 and went back and chopped. This took time out of my busy day! My overall rule was to keep it around 500 and they were saying to make it closer to 300.
Then I remembered some of my own advice from a blog about blogs from last year. Be clear, crisp, and concise. Was I wondering away from my own good medicine?
So I worked harder at “whittling”. How did I do that? I started writing incomplete sentences, dropping “I” from the start of a sentence for example. Word didn’t like that much when I ran spelling and grammar reviews. So be it. It’s NOT wrong to write an incomplete sentence. Think about it; do we speak in complete sentences in every day verbalization? Heck no.
Not going to say to you: “I am going to the store now and I'll see you later today.” I WILL say “goin’ to the store; see ya in a bit.” And you know, the experts DO say to write like you speak; like you’re having a conversation.
So be it. I’m taking away words! Not in a "1984" sense though!
Several of my posts in April came in at just over 400 words; a few came under to my utter delight.
And this one will too.
So in the future, expect shorter blogs from me. If they seem too long let me know. I WILL take into account the subject matter of course; there will be times where it will just have to be longer. All rules have exceptions, although the Main Ingredient sang a different tune on that subject matter in 1972:
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1 comment:
We have set our goal as two smaller posts per day plus twitter and facebook posts. Even with that modest goal, it's just amazing how much work it is.
The contest organizers were correct. Think how much more likely it is that people will read your post if it's like a :30 second TV ad. A bit depressing but true.
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