Mind the Beginner

If you’re not interested in effective writing or have mastered the skill of writing skip this blogpost. If you’re like me and always on the lookout for tips to make things more effective, this one if for you!

Block quotes are one of the three attention-grabbers when scanning an article to see if it’s worth reading. Read the blogpost to discover the other two.

Yesterday I dug up and old syllabus from my previous education as therapist. It was about effective writing and there were some nice pointers in there I really want to share with you. Over the years there have been a lot of blogposts and entire blogs on writing effectively. But as of yet there is one rule in my syllabus that I haven’t found out there yet. It might be, it might not be, at least now it’s here on this blog.

The rule of seven:

• No more than 7 sentences to a paragraph
• No more than 7 paragraphs to a chapter
• No more than 7 chapters to a text

With a margin of 2 on all these.

The word count

Simple isn’t it? But there is more of course. The maximum length of a sentence that  people can comprehend is related to education. It’s bit harsh but people who didn’t finish high school can’t handle sentences the way academics can. If you want to write a text that’s readable for everyone sentences should be no longer than 10 words. High School drop-outs can take 14 words and 24 words is a suitable length for academics. It’s not set in stone but it’s a good guideline to keep in mind when writing. Who is your audience? It’s quite easy to overestimate your readers.

Combining these two rules we get between 1250 and 7290 words to a text for everybody, and 3000 to 17496 words for academics. Somewhere in the order of 7000 words seems the ideal length for the typical eBook and 980 for a blogpost. All these are rough estimates of course but using these you can expect that an eBook over 17500 words long will surely be a bit on the long side.

Improving readability can be done by including underlines, bold, and italics but especially underlines are not a particular good idea in blogposts. After all, links in blogposts are almost always underlined and you could send the wrong signal. A text full of underlined words at first glance would seem like a text full of links. It could get even worse if you underline a word and make it blue as well. Now surely your first impression is that it’s a link. Did you try and click it?

Subheadings

are another way of grabbing attention and dividing a text to improve readability. It draws the attention and effective subheadings will almost lure the reader deeper into the text. The title of the article is the first thing people see and so that too should grab attention while covering the essence of the article. Not to long and definitely to the point, it should leave the reader with the feeling of “I need to read this”. These aren’t all the tools you have to write effectively. Blogreaders are a special breed of readers, they want the information in quick, scannable bits and are always in a hurry. As a blogger you can help your readers with that and provide highly scannable content.

One of the easiest things to scan is the:

• The list
• it’s short
• easy to scan
• and provides structure
• see what I mean?

Chances are you already scanned the list before actually reading the blogpost. Together with the subheadings these are two of the three most scannable features in any blogpost. The last one you’ve probably already scanned as well before deciding to read this post. It’s the block quote at the beginning of this blogpost. These three text-based eye catchers are what grabs you at a first glance. (Four if we count the title of the blogpost.) That leaves us with one non-text eye catcher that is absolutely crucial. A picture is worth a thousand words and doesn’t increase the word count! A bad picture or no picture at all will seem dull and uninspiring. The right picture makes or breaks a blogpost.

The closing line to a blogpost is where you make your statement. Use all the tools you have, make your blogpost scannable, make a clear statement, and don’t forget to write both a good opening and closing  line, they really matters.

I’ve quoted this one before but it’s actually a huge reason for me to have this blog:

• To learn: read
• To know: write
• To master: teach

There is only so much you can do for yourself by reading self-help books, blogs on personal development and other sources. Most people who realize this quickly become bloggers themselves in order to put to writing what they have learned. Over time -months or years- these people become experts of sorts in their fields. They know what they write and they practice what they preach.

Take Jonathan Mead over at Illuminated Mind for instance . I don’t believe could have quit his regular job and gain his freedom if he didn’t blog about it. The same goes for Darren Rowse aka Problogger. Although there was little on blogging in the early days when he started (so he couldn’t read much) he quickly took to writing about it and thus really getting in to the know of blogging.

And now there is me. I’m a zen enthusiast but it’s hard to grasp what zen is about. By writing about it and time and time again trying to put to words what it means I’ve gotten a far better idea on what zen actually is. Hopefully the same goes for you. Through reading you get to learn things that others write about and thus know.

It’s personal development on a new level. Helping others by writing about your experiences will steer them in directions they didn’t know existed. Although truly conveying and experience is impossible you can get people to look in a certain direction.

Not only does personal development this way help you develop yourself but in doing so you help others who are willing to read what you’ve put to words. You get feedback through comments (your readers start writing/knowing) and you all gain new insights. A repeating cycle where eventually you -the writer- gains so much knowledge that you start to teach others. You mastered what you learned.

Again, Jonathan and Darren are perfect examples. They set out to achieve something and now that they are there they want to help others get there too. Darren teaches bloggers how to build a better blog and Jonathan teaches you how to reclaim your dreams and cut the cubicle umbilical cord.

Two prime examples of writers who know so much they now teach to master their field. The very tip of the personal development pyramid.

So it’s up to you now…. do you want to learn? Keep reading. Do you want to know? Start writing. Do you want to master? Read a lot, write about your passions and teach whatever it is you want to master.

It’s a long way up, but from everything I’ve read, it’s awesome up there! It’s the ultimate in personal development.

This blog has been running now for about six weeks and it’s time for me to tell you why I chose to blog, what I want from it and what’s in it for you. It’s a bit of a lengthy post, but I want to let you know who I am and what I’m aiming for.

About me

The “about” page on this blog does tell you some things about me but to keep it easy to read I haven’t told you everything there is to know.  It states that I’m an exercise therapist. (A bachelor’s in Health) What it doesn’t tell you is that I am now 26. If everything went according to plan I should have had that degree at 22. Four years that don’t really make my resume shine. 

So what happened? It took me a long while to decide what I wanted to do after highschool. I dabbled in chemistry and physiotherapy but neither of these quite did it for me. To make matters worse when I was about half way through my bachelor’s the realization came that this wasn’t for me as well. After investing 2 years already I thought I might as well get it finished otherwise I would have spent all that time (and money) without having anything to show for it. Little did I know that there were a few huge walls ahead that would slow me down even more. Walls in the area of social interaction and empathy. 

I’m not the most social guy around, it’s what you get when you grow up in a family like mine. I don’t want to blame it all on them, it’s just that to me it was normal not to interact with people so much and try to sympathize. A gap in my skills that became apparent when I started working with patients. Part of the problem was that I was constantly drifting off with my thoughts. How to manage that? That’s where my zen training started. The rest as they say, is history. It changed the way I thought and allowed me to develop empathy (finally). I got through the last part of my training with flying colors. 

Seeing as exercise therapy wasn’t my calling I started to look round for other things to do with my life. I’ve always been “good with computers”, I enjoy working with them so much that I wanted to pursue a career in the IT sector. Many people have written about being good at something doesn’t mean you should make your job of it and kill all the pleasure you have with it but I feel that for me it would be the best choice. 

I’ve decided to get a masters in information science. The link between the programmer and the consumer. You can see it as the architect, whereas the programmer is the contractor and the consumer is the client. A mix of computer technology and people, just my niche. 

Why I started this blog

Although zen is the main reason for me to get through university it’s not the only thing that made my life easier.Over the years I’ve picked up all sorts of skills, habits, lifehacks and whatnot that got me where I am today. 

When my teachers told me I had a writing style that was very accessible and a pleasure to read they advised me to do something with it. Although they have only read my assignments in Dutch I’m sufficiently bilingual to try and write in English. Although my grammar isn’t perfect at best I do my best to put my thoughts to words. This blog is constantly helping me with developing my language and writing skills.This blog is my channel to develop myself and to tell you what I have learned and how I did it. 

I have started to think more about what I want to do with my life and I can tell you it’s not a full-time job and retire when I’m 65. I want to see the world and have a degree of freedom. To pursue this further I will be using this blog to generate a side income if I can. Although I won’t do this shamelessly with all sorts of advertising. You deserve better than that. No ad sense…Personal development, development of my writing skills, geting to know people and a very modest side income are what’s in it for me. 

What’s in it for you

I believe that I’ve acquired certain skills in my life that can help others with developing their goals. I want to help you with reaching your goals in life, with the use of elements of zen and (un)common sense. I want to get you to feel excited about what you do and thoroughly enjoy your life, even if what you want to do is nonconformist. 

I want to get to know you so I will be interacting with you and try and find out what I can help you with.

What will happen on this blog

This blog will continue to get at least five posts a week. Currently I post every single day, I don’t know if that will stay possible when I go back to university but that’s not until September 2009. For the time being I will keep posting daily. (update 2009-05-14: I’ve reduced the number of postings a week to somewhere around 4. This because my posts were lacking in quality and I was making that up with quantity. In favor of quality I will no longer churn out posts just to say something but will blog only when I truely feel I have something to say.) 

Posts will become better as I develop my writing skills.

Aside from the blogposts I will start writing a few longer essays that will become available as eBooks. 

This blog will slowly grow over time and I aim to reach over 1000 readers a day in the course of a year.

Within a few months this blog will move to a different domain: www.mindthebeginner.com. Once there I will tinker a bit with the layout but the feeling will stay the same.

I hope this post gives you a better understanding of what mindthebeginner is. If you like what I’ve written so far and want to keep up to date on all my posts please subscribe to my RSS feed. If you ever have any questions, suggestions or just want to talk feel free to mail me.