Pre-Writing Strategies For Your Blog Posts.
If you’re lucky, writing blog posts comes naturally. Congratulations! You’re probably a talented writer who can just sit down and write whatever comes to your head. However, there are plenty of us out there who can’t really do that. Instead, we have to rely on some pre-writing strategies to help us get our blogging done. If you’re like me, then you know what I mean. Maybe you could benefit from using some of my own pre-writing strategies?
List Dump
Basically, when you start a list dump, you write down every single idea you have in a list form. These should be single words or short phrases that can become topics of future blog posts. Keep this list in a file that you can add to whenever you feel like list-dumping or whenever you need an idea for a new blog post.
Free-Write for Five Minutes
Another way to start preparing to write a blog post is to actually simply force yourself to write for five minutes. It might seem silly at first, but really, free-writing allows you to just write down whatever you can think of regarding a specific topic. You don’t have to worry about formatting, or typing errors, or grammar, or even making complete sentences. Instead, you just want to get down all of your thoughts so that you can edit them later. Some of these thoughts might turn out useful for a serious blog post.
Map Out Your Ideas
If you’re more of a visual kind of writer, then you might consider pulling out a huge sheet of paper and sketching your blog post into a bubble map or web of ideas. Sketching your ideas into a visual design could help you see how each idea relates to another. It could even help discover some other relationships that you hadn’t thought of before, which would lead to more content for you, either in that same blog post or in future blog posts.
Outline A Post
Outlining is a great way to organize your thoughts. Once you use other pre-writing techniques to figure out what you want to write, you can outline your thoughts to help you organize them into a well-structured blog post that has an introduction, middle, and conclusion. This will make your blog post much easier for your readers to read. Try to fill out an outline format of your ideas: write a thesis statement, topic sentences, supporting details, and a conclusion. When you go to write the actual post, you can pull from those sections and then write in the transitions on your own.
Comment Essay
Another, perhaps more unique, form of pre-writing is to actually build a comment into your actual essay for a post. Go to a blog that you frequently read and select a post in which to write a comment in response. Start typing your response in the comment section and write as long as you can in response to the subject of the post. When you can’t write any longer, copy and paste that comment into your blog post editor. Look for ways that you can flesh it out into a stronger post; when you publish it, be sure to link back to the post on the other blog that inspired it.
