What Makes Great Blogwriting?

(via Write to Done)

What Makes Great Blogwriting?

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” - Oscar Wilde

A well written blog is a beautiful thing to read. When I hit upon a blog with great writing, I can spend hours digging into the archives, learning, laughing, getting to know a writer.

Because a great blogwriter, in the end, is someone you want to be friends with. It’s someone interesting, someone who can tell a story and hold a great conversation and be fantastic company.

Great blogwriting is hard to find, but it’s out there, and it can be done.

I can’t make any claim to being a great blogwriter, but I have been studying it pretty closely over the last couple of years, and I can report back things I’ve learned from my reading, from my experiments with my own writing, and from what has worked and what hasn’t.

Blogwriting: A new form
Remember, blogwriting isn’t the same as writing fiction, or journalism, or magazine writing. There are similarities, of course, but blogwriting is a literary form in itself.

The difference between blogwriting and other forms of writing lies in the audience, and the closeness of the blogger to his readers. Unlike other similar forms of writing, such as the op-ed column, magazine writing and the like, blogwriting is intensely close to the audience. You’re not broadcasting your writing to a remote audience who will read your article or column tomorrow morning (or in some cases, weeks or months later). You’re writing for an audience who will comment on the post mere minutes after you press “publish”. They will argue with you, praise you, become your friends. They will write their own posts, commenting on and analyzing your writing.