Write Better Blog Posts with these 3 Tools!

Write Better Blog Posts with these 3 Tools!

For those of us on the internet who manage a blog, either as a marketing tool or a creative outlet, we know that creating great content week after week is hard! Even for the most talented among us, writing blog posts can be tricky, and let’s be honest, most of us could use some help improving our writing process as well as writing skills. So today I want to share with you three tools that have helped me to become a better blogger and a better writer of blog posts.

Scrivener

Scrivener is a software application that I use on my computer to write, edit and organize my blog posts. I’ve been using the program for years to keep my content in order and to organize my ideas. Although you may not be thinking of a word processing program as a tool that can help with writing better blog posts, it can really streamline the process of creating content. Ask yourself, where do you write your blog posts? Do you use a dedicated word processing program or do you write your posts inside the text editor of your blogging platform? Unfortunately, if you aren’t using a word processing program to organize your writing, you are missing out on a lot of great word processing features like word count, spelling and grammar check, and a built in dictionary/thesaurus! But Scrivener is also more powerful than your standard word processor because it also has great tools for outlining and organizing content ideas within the application. I also love that I have all my blog posts organized in one place, so I can refer back to old posts and I have a record of my content in case something happens to my blog or my website crashes while I’m adding a new post. So, if you aren’t using a dedicated system for writing, editing and organizing your blog posts, I would highly recommend checking out Scrivener. You can read more about how I use Scrivener here or visit their website for more details!

On Writing Well

I’m often asked by other bloggers if there are any courses or books I recommend that can teach you how to write better blog posts. Unfortunately, I am not familiar with any on the specific topic of writing blog posts, however, I do highly recommend a book called On Writing Well to those who wish to improve their writing style! On Writing Well is a classic book that teaches how to improve nonfiction writing, which is what blogging is most of the time. What I love about this book is that it’s an easy read but filled with practical tips for improving your writing, and it even dispels the notion of some long-held “rules” of writing that just aren’t applicable anymore (i.e. ending a sentence with a preposition- you can if you want to!) It’s a very practical guide to writing that has been revised and expanded to include more modern examples of writing, and I think it’s a great place to start if you are someone who’s interested in become a better writer.

Flesch-Kincaid Readability Score

As I was researching ways to improve your writing, I came across the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test that actually scores a piece of writing for how easy it is to understand. This sort of test is frequently used in teaching settings to understand the reading level of a specific written work (think grade school reading levels and such) but I noticed that the SEO Plugin that I use for WordPress, called Yoast SEO, included this score as part of the SEO grading of my post. Now, the idea behind using this test to determine the readability of your post is that your blog posts should be fairly easy for people to read. Blog posts with long sentences and complicated grammar may be harder for most people to understand, so you want to use this score to help you simplify your writing so that more people are able to understand and enjoy your content. As I already mentioned, my blog has a plugin that generates this score for me when I’m formatting my posts for publication, however, if you don’t use WordPress and have access to this Plugin, don’t worry because I found a free web-tool that you can use to check the readability of your blog posts. All you need to do is click here to visit the website and paste your blog post into the text editor on the page and it will generate your readability score! Definitely check it out and see what level your content scores at in terms of readability and perhaps use what you learn while reading On Writing Well to help you simplify and clarify your writing style!

So those are three tools that you can use right now to help you improve your blog posts! I’d love to know if you have any other suggestions if you have experience with any other interesting books or tools that you would like to recommend to the community. If you give any of these tools a try, I’d love to know about it, so please feel free to message me or leave me a comment below to tell me about your progress!

xoxo,