11
I’ll Be Your Guide
Everyone likes telling other people what to do and what to think.
No, that’s too cynical. Let’s try again.
Everyone likes to share with other people lessons they’ve learned, knowledge they’ve gathered, and their opinions about the music, books, movies, and other arts that have brought pleasure to their lives.
We’ve all hunted the Internet for advice, whether it is “how to” guidance or general advice on something we want to know more about: paying for a college education, for example, or dressing well on a budget. And we’ve all gone to our favorite websites and blogs to get a different kind of advice about movies, music, dance, and other arts interests. We seek out reviewers we respect to see what they are saying, and whether they think buying a ticket or paying for a download is worth the money.
Keep in mind that on the World Wide Web, every consumer can also be a producer. You needn’t be just a reader of advice and reviews. You can offer your own. Giving advice, whether about what community theater to attend or how to find discount coupons for shopping, is one more way to build a community of readers. You may not think of yourself as an expert or critic, but odds are you know more about something than others—and probably more about several somethings.
If you’ve spent countless hours going to clubs and bars to listen to live music, and you’ve thought about what you listen to, then you’re an expert on the local music scene. Your experience gives you the knowledge to blog about the latest indie band, particularly if that’s your genre. The stronger your passion, the tighter your niche, the more successful your efforts are likely to be.
If you’ve always had a dog as a pet and you love dogs, you’re something of an expert on dogs.
But if your dogs always have been golden retrievers, a breed whose eccentricities range from eating anything in sight to swimming for hours in circles with a log or ball firmly wedged in one cheek, you’ll write an even more interesting blog about that breed. Why not write a blog that offers advice to owners and would-be owners of golden retrievers? It can be funny and practical: how to keep your puppy from chewing the kitchen wallboard, for example, is pretty important advice.
Writing an Advice Blog
Even though you’ll be writing from experience, advice blogs should bring in facts and evidence that builds your expertise. After all, readers will always ask: How do I know your advice will work?
Here are a few guidelines:
Incorporate the Advice of Other Experts and (Once Again) Link Like Crazy
You’re not the only expert in your subject area on this big round earth, and you are not the only expert in your subject area on the Internet. It helps to cite—and link to—advice offered by others. This not only helps your readers, but benefits you: It makes other bloggers in your subject area aware of your blog. If other bloggers know you, they may link to you, and, as mentioned earlier in the book, that’s an effective way to build an audience. If you disagree with other experts you nonetheless respect, link to them as well and then explain why you’re challenging their advice. This can lead to a lively discussion.
Don’t Be Afraid to Offer an Opinion
This is your show. Don’t be wishy-washy or offer two-handed advice (“on the one hand … but on the other hand”). Melinda F. Emerson of Pennsylvania is known as the “SmallBizLady” online and writes a useful blog about starting and running a small business at her website succeedasyourownboss.com. Her advice is succinct and confident. “I’ve been in business more than 15 years,” she says, “so I know what the issues are when you are running a small business.” That’s confidence.
Mix Advice and Demonstration
Don’t just tell people what to do; show them. This is an area in which multimedia elements can make your blog so much better. Use photos. Use videos. Use charts or graphics. If you’re writing a baking blog, for example, and you’ve written a post about how to make chocolate chip cookies, don’t just write out the recipe. Take your own photos as you make the cookies and include them in your blog. Break out a simplified step-by-step sidebar of measured ingredients. It always helps readers seeking advice to not only be told how to do something, but to see how it’s done.
Remember the “Three S Rule”
Good advice comes with a caveat we call the “Rule of Three S’s.” Keep your writing succinct, simple, and sincere. If you find you’ve written a draft of an article that’s long and wordy and incorporates three different pieces of advice, break it into three blog posts (and edit for wordiness). Each post should have a narrow and specific focus.
Consider these excerpts from two posts about looking for a job. The first is by a “career transition coach.” Do you think she follows the Three S’s Rule?
Transformation seems to be the word of the year. Everything is transforming, everybody is transforming. It used to be good enough to change, but not anymore. You’ve got to transform.
The two words are often used interchangeably and they are certainly related; yet they are quite different. In fact, on the outside, depending on what it is, transformation and change may look exactly alike. The real difference between the two lies on the inside.
What do you think? Our guess is that your answer is something like, “huh?” The first paragraph here uses “transform” four times and insists transformation is different from change. It doesn’t say how, though. The second paragraph tries to explain that difference—and fails utterly.
You needn’t be a virtuoso of words to be clear. This excerpt from a company advice blog gets to the point. Want your resume read? Here’s how:
Think about how your resume looks to the busy hiring manager who’s reading it for the first time. Here at Integrity Staffing Solutions, we often receive hundreds of resumes in a week, or even a day, so we must be able to scan them quickly to see which ones meet our requirements. The resumes most likely to get our serious attention are those that:
- Are arranged in a way that makes sense.
- Don’t waste our time with information we don’t need.
- Present us with the case for the applicant’s employment.
The standard resume format is to start with a summary, then your job history, and lastly your skills and education. But your primary consideration should be what the hiring department needs to know first. Organize your resume information in order of importance to the job in question:
- Put your experience first when—The job you want is one that is focused on the skills and accomplishments that you’ve made at previous jobs.
- Put your education first when—The job you want is based in academia or your education is the only thing that links you to this new job role.
- Put your skills first when—You don’t have job experience or you need to show that your skills outweigh your education or your job history.
Not everyone has to agree with your advice. It does, however, need to be clear.
- Build your own club. Succinct, simple, and sincere doesn’t mean dull. Have fun when you write. Don’t be afraid of being clever; just don’t force things (see Chapter 4, “Writing as Rap”). No reader wants to wade through your oh-so-witty prose to find the advice buried somewhere in the eighth paragraph. Your fans do want to be engaged by your voice, however. So be an interesting personality—yourself, not some facsimile of yourself filled with hot air.
- Make your blog a conversation. As an advice columnist, you should always answer your readers’ questions. Sometimes, though, you don’t just want to do this under comments. You also can address readers’ questions in subsequent blogs. That’s what Melinda Emerson does.
She begins one blog post by quoting a query from a reader:
One of my loyal blog readers asked: I’ve learned from you and others that personal branding is a must if you want to set yourself up as an expert in your given area. I have a few trusted advisors who are black women. They suggested that I needed to take my face off of my site to create a “colorless” business if I wanted to be known beyond the black construct. They said that I should use a white woman and not myself to be the face of my business. Did you go through any of this? If so, how did you overcome it?
Emerson gives the reader a straight-ahead answer:
Thank you for asking me this question. First of all, I will answer your first question. No, I’ve not really faced this. But I also never write or talk about being a successful black woman in business. I only talk about how to become successful in business. I don’t think anyone cares that I’m African-American. They only care about whether my information can help them in running their small business better.
Now, your business is very different from mine; I am selling information and my small business expertise. You are selling services. In your case, I would not necessarily brand your name or your face to your business other than on your “about” page. Look at your top competitors. I do not see many who focus on their personal brand. I think you should consider renaming your business and do the same. No one cares that you are black, they just care that you are good.
David Weliver
“Blogging is neither a sprint nor a marathon—it’s a journey that will take years”
David Weliver of Maine is the publisher of moneyunder30.com, a personal finance website that offers advice to young professionals.
David Weliver
Why did you decide to start your blog?
I began my career at a national financial magazine but later moved into a non-editorial position. I began blogging as a way to continue writing, but also because I saw a need for content that fit a specific niche—basic personal finance advice for young professionals that was presented in a clear, non-judgmental way.
I started my blog as a hobby, but I always kept an eye on the possibility of growing it into more than that. After two years of blogging I was able to sell some advertising and make a bit of money from it on the side. In my blog’s fifth year, it became my full-time job.
How do you come up with ideas for blog post topics?
In the beginning, coming up with topics was easy because I wanted to cover my subject area—personal finance for young professionals—as comprehensively as possible. So I looked at other publications like Money magazine and the Wall Street Journal and tried to cover the most popular topics in a way that my audience would enjoy.
As I exhausted some of the more basic topics, I began turning to my readers for ideas. Many post ideas now come from readers who email me with questions and from semi-annual surveys I send to readers asking what their challenges are with money and what they’d like to read more about.
How frequently do you post to your blog (in an average week) and how many hours each week do you spend working on your blog?
Today we publish four or five articles a week. I spend 35 or 40 hours a week on the blog, but I’m only writing 10 to 20 percent of this time. The rest of the time I’m editing other writers’ work, developing post ideas and an editorial calendar, selling advertising and managing advertiser relationships, promoting the blog, and handling technical updates.
What are the three most important things a new advice blogger needs to know?
- Choose a niche. In a sea of millions of websites, it’s difficult to stand out. Spend a good amount of time becoming familiar with other bloggers who cover your topic and ask yourself, “How will my blog be different?” Can you bring a colorful voice to the subject or choose a narrow sub-topic that allows you to become a trusted commentator in that niche?
- Write for your audience, not yourself. The best way to get your blog read is to connect with people who want to hear what you have to say. Your first readers (aside from your mom and best friend) will be the hardest to get. Show them appreciation by responding to comments and writing thank you emails. Most importantly, ask them what they want to read. Not only will it give you good material to blog about, it will encourage them to come back again.
- Be persistent. This is the most important advice I can give. Blogging is neither a sprint nor a marathon—it’s a journey that will take years. Getting started will be frustrating and slow, there will be highs and lows along the way, and you’ll make mistakes. Set a writing schedule that you can stick with (more isn’t necessarily better), try new things, talk to other bloggers and keep going. Eventually good things will come.
Writing Reviews
We’re all reviewers. We offer friends our opinions on music, fashion, movies, food, cars, and more every day.
“Yeah, I saw that movie last week. It starts kinda slow, but when the two guys rob the casino it really gets interesting. The scenery is great, too. You oughta see it.”
“No, I wouldn’t go to that new restaurant, Tavolo’s Kitchen. They cook the pasta until it’s like wet newspaper and the sauce tastes like ketchup. You want good Italian food? Go over to Mechanic Street and eat at Amici’s. Get the veal osso buco—fantastic. And try the zabaione for dessert. You won’t empty your savings account either. The prices are reasonable.”
It’s true that putting this kind of advice into written words demands a little more craft than the casual comment. But the idea is the same. Write in the tone you’d use giving advice to a friend. We suggest you do the following as well: Be clear and confident in your opinion; describe what you’re reviewing with concrete language and examples; know the subject’s context well enough to link to other resources; and, again, keep things succinct, simple, and sincere. And don’t be dull. If you can make your friends laugh, you can make your readers laugh, too.
Deciding what to review can be tricky. Topics are almost limitless— there will always be a new album or concert, a restaurant you’ve never visited before, and new fashions about which you’ve got plenty to say. Unfortunately, so do tens of thousands of other bloggers (and thousands of professional journalists).
That leaves you a choice:
- Choose a niche that isn’t already crowded with bloggers. Instead of reviewing pop music, for example, review one type of pop music or only the pop music produced by bands in your city or your slice of that city. Instead of reviewing fashion, review lipstick colors.
- Go ahead and review the bands, pop music, and fashions everyone else is reviewing, but work to stand out from the pack. If you don’t have a niche, you need both a distinctive voice (see Chapter 4) and substantive knowledge.
Remember: Blogging gives you the freedom to break out of the formatted styles you’ve learned in school or at work. It will take time and a certain amount of trial and error to develop your own voice, but that’s part of the fun of blogging.
Blogging gives you the incentive to explore, discover and learn things. You want to write about classic films? Then study the great actors and directors and what’s been said about them. It’s not good enough to say that the chemistry between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made the movie Key Largo. You’d better know that the two fell in love on the set of their first film together, To Have and Have Not, that they married, that he called her “Baby,” and that she was 25 years his junior. Not that you have to flash all that knowledge in every review. It’s just part of what journalists call “doing your homework,” knowing the broader-based context of your area of expertise.
Liam McCarthy and Corey Plante knew this even before they began their blog Snippet Studios (www.snippetstudios.com), devoted primarily to movie reviews, after they graduated in 2011 from Rhode Island’s Providence College. They’d been writers at their college paper and they missed writing for publication. Today, the pair spend 10 or more hours a week each on the blog, writing or editing posts of contributors, and adding to an archive of hundreds of reviews.
McCartney offers this advice: “Watch every movie you can get your hands on. Then look up criticism on those movies. Build a library of knowledge about film that you can draw on.”
“Learn about filmmaking,” he continues. “Learn about the jobs and their responsibilities. Learn about cameras and cinematography so you can write about the look of a film, the way it might use color, or framing, to tell something. Know the ins and outs of the process of making a movie. This will only help you appreciate films more and enrich your ability to write about them.”
Reading film scholars, however, does not mean sounding like them. The voice of the blogger is more conversational than that in other forms of writing. In fact, think of blogging as some mix of talking and writing—well-edited talking, we should add. When you do find your blogging voice, your readers will let you know.
If you’re not convinced that voice matters, consider these two examples in which bloggers review the same album.
Example 1:
Iggy Azalea is an artist I have been following since her early mix tape days and watching her music and techniques evolve has been incredible. 2014 see’s the release of her highly anticipated debut album rightfully titled The New Classic. This album is an impressive collection of material that see’s Iggy staying true to her roots with music that reminds me of her mix tapes Ignorant Art and Trapp Gold. Her honesty and sassiness is something I have always loved and lyrically the songs featured on the album are quite personal and has seen her open up to the world. “I Don’t Need Y’all” is the most passionate and honest songs on the record and has quickly become a fan favorite. “And if you wasn’t here when I was down then you won’t be here when I’m up. Now the same one you looked over be the same one that blew up.” It’s lyrics like this that most artists would be too scared to say but she’s not afraid, not even a little.
Example 2:
She’s a singer and a rapper, the first white woman to appear on the cover of XXL, and an uninformed expert on Aborigines. She has scored three U.K. Top 20 hits but endured the delayed release of her debut album, the optimistically titled The New Classic. Iggy Azelea, in short, understands the vagaries of third tier stardom in the 21st century. “Have you ever wished your life could change?” she asks on “Change Your Life,” a collaboration with former label mate T.I. Eleven tracks later the question lingers. Zippy, squeaky, and context-free, The New Classic establishes the Australian artist as a competent rapper with a decent ear for hooks, but that’s about it.
The fustiest part of the album is helmed by Norway’s The Messengers, the duo responsible for the stuttering, whirring, processed beats and manipulated multi-track harmonies for the likes of Justin Bieber, Chris Brown, and Pitbull. What that leaves Iggy with is a state of the art 2011 album, designed to compete with the 2014 versions of Nicki Minaj and Rihanna: good luck.
Forget whether or not you care about Azalea. Ask yourself, which review draws your interest? We’ll take odds it’s the second.
In the first, the writer’s voice is tentative and uses the first-person pronoun needlessly (it’s a review; we know it’s your opinion). A ghastly serial spelling mistake (see’s instead of sees) makes the reader stop and reread a couple of sentences. Straining to describe the music, the writer falls back on empty and general descriptions: “incredible,” “impressive,” and “passionate.”
The second reviewer writes with more style and snark. Both make the review distinctive. The writer varies the sentence length to create pace and chooses evocative, original words like “zippy,” “squeaky,” and “stuttering” to describe the music. The review’s last two words, “good luck,” deliver the verdict with snap.
So far, we’ve focused on two important skills in casting successful reviews: establishing a voice when you write and building expertise before you start.
Here are four more suggestions of how to achieve success.
Study the Stars of Your Field
Everyone has writers whose work they admire. It helps to study their work, to emulate the way they build a review, their choice of detail, their use of language, the way they reference old works or other current works as a means of comparison.
Imitation isn’t plagiarism. Imitation is how we learn. The jazz trumpet player and teacher Clark Terry taught students how to play jazz and improvise in three steps: Imitate. Assimilate. Innovate. As you read writers and bloggers whose work you admire, you imitate them. As you imitate, you begin (slowly at first) to absorb the style of writers you admire and it becomes part of your own style, your own voice. Over time, as you build the frame and details of your style by assimilating, you begin to innovate, to speak in a voice that is yours. Your growth as a writer starts with reading others and, if you work hard enough, your own style flowers.
Miles Davis, another trumpet player and one of the greatest musicians in the history of jazz, told a documentary filmmaker he spent the early part of his career imitating other musicians. “You have to play a long time,” Davis said, “before you sound like yourself.”
Be Original
“Given that many will write on the same movies, it helps if you can think of an original angle,” suggests Roy Flannagan, who started a popular blog, The Film Doctor: Notes On Cinema, after he was laid off from a job as a newspaper critic in 2008. “For one review, I compared a blockbuster movie to a plastic cap for a bottle of grape juice.”
Put What You Are Reviewing into a Larger Perspective
For a few years, before the days of blogging, author Mark Leccese made a modest living writing about books. For one publication, Mark wrote a 2,500-word profile each month of an author. To prepare, he would read each author’s previous books, or at least a significant slice of them. It helped him formulate questions and explain how the author’s new book fit into his or her body of work.
When the writer Leslie Epstein, for example, published Pinto and Sons, a novel about a Hungarian Jewish immigrant in the American West during the gold rush of the 1840s, Mark read Epstein’s previous novels. Eleven years earlier, Epstein had published his most acclaimed (and controversial) novel, King of the Jews, a dark comedy set in a Jewish ghetto in Poland during World War II.
When writing about Epstein’s new novel, Mark discussed how the writer’s new novel differed from his most famous—and perhaps most similar—previous novel:
As in King of the Jews, the battle of hope and charity against the world’s blind cruelty dominates Pinto and Sons. But the naïf Pinto, unlike King’s vain and clever Trumpleman, is nearly swamped by humanity’s brutal passions: greed, fear, anger, force, ignorance and solecism.
The more you know about someone’s old work—an author’s, musician’s, film director’s, dance choreographer’s—the more intelligently you can review what’s new.
Every review begins with background work: Where did the artist and the art come from to get to this point?
Be Fair and Thorough in What You Review
Your readers expect you to cover your topic area fully. So don’t only cover what you think will appeal to you: “Particularly with something like amateur film criticism, it’s easy to slip into the habit of only reviewing the movies you want to,” says Corey Plante, a co-founder with McCarthy of Snippet Studios. “This is really, really dangerous. If you want to exercise your critical eye then you’re going to need to see the movies you don’t want to. You’re going to develop your critical eye and be able to articulate why a terrible movie is so terrible. [And] be critical of the movies you love, because even those have their faults.”
The same advice applies across the board to books, plays, dance, music, and all other forms of criticism.
“There’s a lot writing a diary has in common with writing a review blog”
Frederic Heath-Renn, a computer programmer who lives in London, writes an excellent blog on popular music called Radio Ember (http://radioember.blogspot.com).
Frederic Heath-Renn
Why did you decide to start your blog?
I fell sharply for music at the age of about 15, having not really been interested in it when young, and with a convert’s zeal I devoured canonical lists somewhat desperately to tell me what I’d missed, including (because I was aware I liked Britpop) the Mercury Prize [an annul award to the 12 best albums from the UK and Ireland]. So when the Mercury Prize rolled around in 2009, I decided I’d listen to all of the nominees, review them, and rank them. A friend encouraged me to continue, and I found that I really enjoyed trying to think more deeply about the music I listened to, so I carried on.
How do you come up with ideas for blog post topics?
For the most part, my choice of topics is quite undisciplined, and I write about anything that’s caught my ear recently. But I try to write about new music that interests me as close to its release as possible—it gives me a sense of entirely undeserved satisfaction that what I’m writing is a new and novel opinion that deserves to be recorded (and I’ve noticed it tends to provoke a spike in hits, too, which is not a bad thing for my ego). And because I enjoy wordplay and trivia, I enjoy tenuously linking my writing to current events—albums with “bronze,” “silver” and “gold” in the name during the 2012 London Olympics, for instance. It adds a satisfying challenge because it constrains my choice of things to write about, stopping me from getting lazy and writing about the same sorts of music all the time.
How frequently do you post to your blog (in an average week) and how many hours each week do you spend working on your blog?
While I was at university I usually managed one or two a week (especially since I was also writing about music for the student newspaper at the time), but since I’ve graduated and got a job, it’s become more of a conscious effort to write, and since I’m quite tired in the evening I average around two posts a month now. But the upside of this is that I feel my writing is more considered now, and even if I usually write each of my blog posts over the course of perhaps three hours in total, I spend lots of my time at work and commuting listening and re-listening to the albums I write about, so I spend a lot of time thinking about them.
What are the three most important things a new blogger who wants to write reviews needs to know?
One, don’t be ashamed of rankings. There are a lot of problems with the standard marks-out-of-ten model and it’s easy to feel that assigning artworks some arbitrary rank on a scale cheapens your writing and encourages people to skip over what you actually think. But as a writing tool, ranking is really useful because it forces you to distill your thinking into one bald fact: you have to put your cards on the table and say, well, do I actually like listening to this or not? How does this compare to other things I’ve listened to recently? And even if you never actually publish the mark, I think drawing connections like that in your head and forcing yourself not to be too wishy-washy is useful to strengthen your writing.
Two, challenge yourself. People are often confused when I talk about listening to things I am sure I’m going to dislike, because it seems perverse, but I feel that if you don’t force yourself to pay attention to things you hate—and, more importantly, ask yourself why it is you hate them—you’re going to find something lacking when you try to write about things you love. Plus, unleashing your most poetic bile on something you truly hate is great fun. Three, keep a diary. There’s a lot writing a diary has in common with writing a review blog. Keeping a diary encourages you to go over your days and think about how you felt about them, and that’s exactly the skill that’s going to help you writing reviews. Plus, it’s an excellent excuse to write every day, and if there’s anything that will improve your writing ability it’s writing as regularly and often as possible.
Discussion
- When do you turn to advice blogs? What do you look for in choosing one to follow or read?
- Discuss in small groups what review blogs, if any, you read regularly. Each of you should explain why you like a particular blog. In the same groups, ask your classmates what topic they’d pick for a review blog and why. This can lead to a discussion about just what makes someone an expert.
Write three reviews about a topic that interests you. It can be anything you’ve followed closely—music, art, books, video games, new apps, comics, food, dance, fast cars, whatever. Your first review should be a minimum of 600 words. Then write a 300-word review on a different theme. Your third review must be 150 words or less. All must be substantive. Discuss with classmates which review is hardest to write and why.