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What Kinds of Content Can You Create Based on Writers’ Archetypes

A few weeks ago, I (re)published a blog article called The Eight Writers’ Archetypes and the kinds of things they write. This breaks down the writing field beyond just fiction and non-fiction. It looks at the different areas where writers can work in education, news, politics, PR, marketing, and fiction.

Here’s a truncated version of the eight writers’ archetypes.

Writer Archetypes
The 8 writer archetypes. Each one is a progression of the one that comes before it.
  1. Informer: These are the journalists and the news writers. They tell us the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the world.
  2. Analyst: What does the news mean? What can we infer from the latest political polls? What will the U.S. pandemic relief package do to the economic recovery? The political pundits, the economists, the financial gurus are all Analysts.
  3. Educator: Writers who convey knowledge to help others learn. It’s more than just being an Informer because their readers presumably already know how something works. The writer who writes to intentionally teach is an Educator.
  4. Chronicler: The Chronicler is the observer of the human condition. You find a lot of newspaper columnists here. They’re not quite news-tellers (Informers), but they don’t fit anywhere else. Historians are usually found among the Chroniclers.
  5. Advocate: The rabble-rouser with a pen. They observe the human condition, but they speak for those who have no voice to effect change. The Advocate brings awareness to a cause to get people to care about it and be informed.
  6. Persuader: One step beyond the Advocate, the Persuader gets people to take action on something, but not necessarily a social cause. Political speechwriters, people in ministry, and public relations people work here, but marketers do not.
  7. Merchant: The Merchant is a Persuader who gets people to spend money (i.e. Marketing). You could call this a subset of Persuader, but this is the only writing archetype where the primary focus is to get people to spend money.
  8. Entertainer: Writers of fiction, poetry, stage plays, screenplays. Anything you would read, watch, or hear for entertainment or escapism lives here.

I also said that it’s not uncommon for writers to bounce around between the different archetypes. For example, a typical writing week will see me bounce from Educator to Merchant to Entertainer to Chronicler, sometimes all in a day.

Others can mash a couple archetypes together. For example, an entertainer-merchant is someone who regularly writes short pulp novels strictly with an eye toward making money, not art. The Chronicler-Advocate observes the human condition in the hopes of changing it, like a columnist with a partisan publication. Even an Educator-Merchant is possible, with people teaching webinars and seminars on some topic, but in exchange for money. (We all need to make a living, yes?)

Can content marketing fit within the Writers’ Archetypes??

Short answer, yes.

Longer answer, it depends on what your goal is. Any of these eight archetypes’ “hats” can be worn when you’re trying to create regular content for your company’s website. Let me show you.

  1. Informer: How does your product work? What problems does it solve? Did you know you can do this with it? If nothing else, this content only serves to boost your SEO efforts, provided it’s interesting and well-written. (Don’t just put up flat bullshit content to bulk up your website.) Company history fits here, as does your About Us page. These are also important for your website, so don’t neglect them.
  2. Analyst: What’s going on in your industry? What does it mean for your customers? What’s happening in your company and what does that mean? We all ask “how does this affect me?” This is where you answer those questions. Show people your expertise by answering that question about your industry’s news.
  3. Educator: How do I do this better? How can I get better at my job? A lot of the content I write for this blog is educational because I’m actually teaching new content marketers about how to do their jobs better. Can you do that for your customers?
  4. Chronicler: This one is a little tougher. You could put case studies in here because they’re little mini-histories. “Company A had a problem that was costing them $X. Company B brought Company A a solution. It worked so well, it saved them $Y.” If you can answer the question “What happened and what does it mean?” it fits here.
  5. Advocate: This person is almost a non-profit Marketer. We want you to change your beliefs, at least long enough to give us money. Your stories are just like a Chronicler’s, but there’s a deeper lesson you want us to learn from it. Think of the nonprofit asking for money by introducing us to one particular person that they’ve helped in the past.
  6. Persuader: Content that gets us to take action, but maybe not spend money. Sign up for our newsletter, follow us on Twitter, write to your elected officials. These are all persuasive actions that don’t require us to spend money.
  7. Merchant: This is the “BUY THIS NOW” content. The advertising copy, the catalog copy, the sales messages. The Merchant content is written strictly to separate customers from their money.
  8. Entertainer: This is a tough one. Content marketing that is written strictly for entertainment purposes is few and far between. However, it can be done. This is where you find the unusual content pieces, like a comic book, radio play, podcast, or even a magazine. As Neil Gaiman said in 2012, “Make good art.” That’s what you should do, but no one said the art couldn’t make money too.

If you’re a writer or content creator of any type, you can branch over into another type and get your feet wet. Don’t pigeonhole yourself and think “I’m only a copywriter” or “I only make podcasts.” You can play in other areas because you already have the basic tools you need. Copywriters can write poetry and short stories. Podcasters can make audio theater or collaborate with a novelist and make audiobooks.

Expand beyond what you think you can create and find something new. Figure out ways to offer that kind of content on your website. Go beyond the dry old blogs about products and start offering a little more, even if it’s telling stories about past victories and customers you’ve helped. Make them entertaining and fun to read. Use those great writing skills to get more people to like what you have to say about your company.

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The Conundrum of Writing With Integrity

I recently heard Jamal Greene on a recent Two Writers Slinging Yang podcast interview, talking about his time writing at Sports Illustrated.

He talked about writing at Sports Illustrated where the writing became an issue of what the reader wanted. He called it a form of customer service, or “serve to order.”

If the customer wants it, or the editors thought they wanted a certain product, and your job as the writer was to produce that product. And over the time I was at Sports Illustrated, it became more and more oriented towards customer service and that didn’t touch me.

If you’re in it because you like to write in a certain way, and then you’ve got to write in a way that’s going to get eyeballs, you’re not really writing with the kind of integrity that you want. And I felt that and I didn’t think I was ever going to get to the point, for good reason, where I had the kind of autonomy to write in the way I wanted to write

Photo of a typewriter. Tactile writing like this just screams writing with integrity.The phrase writing with integrity stopped me in my tracks. I had to pause the podcast and ruminate on that for several minutes.

As content marketers, we don’t get the chance to write with integrity very often. Sure, we like to be ethical and truthful. Despite the stereotype people have of marketers, we do try to operate with honesty and truth. But when do we get to actually write with integrity?

When do we get the chance to be open and transparent — the buzzword among many bloggers in the early-2010s — and share what’s really going on? When do we get the chance to tell a good story because it’s a good story and not just one more entry on our content marketing calendar?

“Today, we need an article about how developers can download our API and use our testing environment.”

Not something that allows for a lot of “writing with integrity.”

The problem is, the same that Greene experienced at Sports Illustrated, is that the integrity articles — the long-form, in-depth articles — are not the most popular ones. They’re the best ones, to be sure. But they don’t get the eyeballs. And that’s what journalism is about these days: getting eyeballs and clicks and visits to move advertising revenue. The long, well-done articles don’t get the traffic, and so they don’t get the attention. They’re the ones that get submitted for awards and for inclusion in anthologies. But they don’t get the same kind of traffic as “10 Reasons Why Your Favorite Team Sucks and 10 Why They’ll Win Their Division.”

It’s this way with business blogs. There are certain articles that get all kinds of traffic, but they’re not always the enjoyable, long-form articles that exercise your writing muscles. Instead, you have to write the kinds of articles where you say, “I got a creative writing degree for this? A damn monkey could write this!”

It’s even harder if you write for a corporation, or if you’re in the B2B world, where being dowdy and rigid is practically the price of admission. Very rarely do I see B2B blog articles that are fun, funny, or interesting. (And the ones I did see were more than likely ones that I wrote.)

Content Marketing With Integrity

But that doesn’t mean you can never do it. There are times that companies should be a little vulnerable and tell some stories that show people your history. Let them learn from your mistakes. Write a piece that talks about how your company nearly folded, and it was only thanks to some last-minute maneuvering that saved everyone. (Trust me, that story will be out there anyway, so you might as well be the one to tell it.)

Tell the story about how your solution didn’t work for a customer right away, and it took some additional work, consulting, and even training to get things to work properly. Don’t skip over that part in your case study, embrace it and showcase it.

Just like sportswriters have to write the daily news stories and game recaps (also called “gamers”) in order to be able to write the long-form features that make sportswriting so interesting, marketers need to carry water on a daily basis, writing the serve-to-order stories before they can write their other, better stories.

Of course, you may be in an industry or work for a business where you don’t get to write with integrity at all. Financial services, lawyers, pharmaceutical companies, and other highly-regulated businesses tend not to be able to write something that risky.

But for the rest of you, stop worrying about stories that will only bring in the eyeballs. Take a risk once in a while on a story that’s not a listicle, or something that promises “X Secrets to Improve Your Productivity.” While I like those articles and think they’re great traffic generators, they’re not very interesting or deep.

If you’re into the content marketing funnel philosophy, keep writing your “top of funnel” articles to bring people in. But try writing with integrity and transparency, and write the article you’ve been itching to write, and use it at the bottom of the funnel where people are about ready to sign.

Take a risk, try something new, and write the story you’ve been feeling, not the story on your content calendar.

Photo credit: Devanath (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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Five Grammar Rules You’re Allowed to Break

The English language is filled with all kinds of grammar rules that should never have been grammar rules in the first place. Some were created a few hundred years ago, some were created in the 20th century, but many of them were incorrect and are just parroted out of habit.

In other cases, some of these grammar rules have changed over the years, thanks to common usage. The English language is an ever-changing tapestry of nonsense, and what may have been true once is true no longer. For example, “nice” used to mean “ignorant,” and the word “naughty” used to mean “poor.”

Here are five grammar rules you’re allowed to break, or at least shouldn’t blindly cling to because it’s what you learned in the 7th grade.

Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway sitting at a desk writing on a tablet. This guy knew a few things about writing and breaking grammar rules.

1. You CAN end your sentences with a preposition.

People cling to this rule like it’s carved in stone, but it should never have been a rule in the first place. While there are a few cases where you should not end your sentences with a preposition, there are plenty of cases where you just sound silly trying to meet it.

The rule was basically started by a guy named John Dryden, who, by all accounts, was a not-well-liked fusspot of a writer in the late 17th century. He abhorred the use of prepositions at the end of sentences, so he declared this should be the case.

Robert Lowth thought this was a smashing idea, so he included it in his A Short Introduction to English Grammar, which he published in 1762. It was the first book on English grammar, and its effects are still being felt.

it didn’t help that both men were Latin scholars who wanted English to bend to the same rules as Latin. In the Latin sentence structure, it’s not possible to have a sentence end with a preposition. Ergo, said the pedants, English shouldn’t either.

But it’s wrong. There are times you have to end your sentences in a preposition. For example, let’s say you stepped in something that stinks, and your friend says to you, “In what did you step?”

Wouldn’t you look at her like she lost her mind?

In that instance, it’s perfectly okay to say “what did you step in?” It’s proper English, it’s grammatically correct, and it doesn’t sound completely idiotic.

On the other hand, “where’s it at?” is wrong.

The basic rule is: if you can remove a preposition and the sentence still works, you shouldn’t use the preposition. But if you remove it, and the sentence changes, you should leave the preposition at the end.

Okay: What did you step in?
Not Okay: Where is it at?

2. You CAN start a sentence with And, But, or Or.

This may have been a real grammar rule at one point, but it is no longer. Common usage has rendered it obsolete. It may not be completely acceptable in business writing, but I can foresee that rule breaking down in the next ten years as more business people speak that way.

Besides, it looks pretty cool. And dramatic. And punchy. And intense.

And it turns out the practice has been around since the 10th century. It’s just some arbitrary rule our English teachers liked to enforce without ever knowing why.

3. You don’t have to start with the dependent clause first

A dependent clause is a sentence clause that can’t exist on its own. “Before the trial even ended” is a dependent clause (it’s also called a subordinate clause). And we were told that you needed to start sentences with a dependent clause. (Ooh, look, I just did rule #2!)

“Before the trial even ended, the real killer had been arrested and the defendant was set free.” not “The real killer had been arrested and the defendant was set free, before the trial even ended.” Even though you might want the important information at the front of the sentence, our teachers told us to put the dependent clause first.

You don’t have to do that anymore. For one thing, it sounds clunky. For another, there are times where the dependent clause will get in the way. Third, there are times a dependent clause needs to be set apart in a different way.

Even Grammarly is a bit of a stickler for grammar rules. It's trying to tell me the sentence that starts "Which brings" should start as "This brings."“The real killer was arrested — before the trial even ended — and the defendant was freed.”

It doesn’t always fit at the end, but it doesn’t always have to go first either.

Your better bet? Eliminate the dependent clause completely, or make it a standalone sentence. Which brings me to my next point.

4. You CAN use incomplete sentences.

This was a very minor point of contention while I was writing Branding Yourself (affiliate link). One of my editors would tell me not to use incomplete sentences.

Like this.

“But it’s a style choice,” I would say. “Not a grammar issue.”

And while you don’t want to make that a regular habit, stylistically, it doesn’t hurt to do it once in a while. It’s another common usage issue, where enough people have begun doing this that the grammar sticklers have to bow to majority rules and allow the change in the accepted use. (They don’t have to like it, and they’ll talk about it at dinner parties, but they’ll generally leave you alone about it.)

They also add some punch and drama to your writing, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction. Pepper them occasionally throughout your writing and see what it does for you.

5. A sentence does not always contain a subject, a verb, and an object. A paragraph does not always contain 3 – 5 sentences.

Journalists violate this rule all the time.

Because it’s a dumb rule. And untrue.

For one thing, people read differently than they did 30 years ago. We’re so impatient that we don’t want to read a lot of text. We need white space to break up the monotony of the Tolstoy-esque blocks of text we find in some books, tech manuals, and magazines. If you’ve ever looked at a page with a lot of tiny text and no breaks at all, you know what I’m talking about.

Newspaper publishers learned a long time ago that people won’t read long paragraphs and über-long sentences. So they encouraged writers to use short punchy words, short sentences, and short paragraphs.

Even one-sentence paragraphs.

My daughter has been told her paragraphs all need to be 3 – 5 sentences long, and I keep telling her it’s not only unnecessary, but it leads to bad writing. If you try to fill up every paragraph with 3 – 5 sentences, you start writing filler just to get there.

But if you keep some extra white space in your writing — by using short paragraphs — people are more likely to continue reading long beyond when they thought they would quit.

How about you? What grammar rules do you gladly (or unwittingly) violate? Are there rules you wish you could break? Leave a comment and let me know.

This post has been refreshed and updated from its original June 2011 publication.

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Blogging For Your Business Speaker Schedule

I’m part of the Blogging For Your Business seminar series this month, and it’s already well underway. I’m very honored to be a part of such an august group and know several of the names on here.

If you want to learn about how blogging can establish you as an expert in your field, boost your SEO, and stand out from your non-blogging competition, this is a great event for you. You’ll learn from several of the experts in the industry, you can register right here.

And if you register in time to hear my session, I will be giving away a free ebook on 12 (Or More) Steps to Improve Your Writing. (Link coming soon.)

  • Monday, May 3rd – Barry Feldman – Fast-Track Your Content Marketing Plan

    • Monday, May 3rd – Amy Woods – Repurpose Your Content Like Top TV Talk Shows

    Tuesday, May 4th – Debra Eckerling – Goal-Setting Simplified For Your Business Blog Using the D*E*B Method

    Tuesday, May 4th – Jason Falls – Holy Smokes! How to Push the Envelope and Stand Out With Social Content Strategy

    Wednesday, May 5th – Mary Kate Gulick – Cornerstone Content: Your Best, First Content Move to Boost Credibility & Authority

    Wednesday, May 5th – Rebekah Read – The 3-Step Plan to Getting Your Website Shown on Google

    Thursday, May 6th – Vicky Laffey – Never Be Stuck for Content Ideas Again!

    Thursday, May 6th – Jennifer Grayeb – How to Know if Your Marketing Is Working and Exactly What to Do if It’s Not

    Friday, May 7th – Erika Heald – How to Audit and Refresh Your Existing Blog Content

    Friday, May 7th – Ilise Benun – Content Marketing on Steroids

    Saturday, May 8th – Lily Ugbaja – Creating Content That Ranks and Converts

    Sunday, May 9th – Chad Pollitt – How to Attract Over 50K Subscribers in 6 Months

    Monday, May 10th – Urwah Kamran – The Bait: How to Create a Freebie That Turns Your Audience Into Paying Customers

    Monday, May 10th – Christine Marie Pizzuto – The Right Content Mindset

    Tuesday, May 11th – Amanda Webb – How to Attract More Blog Readers Than Ever Before

    Tuesday, May 11th – Chris Craft – The Power of Repurposing Content in Digital Media

    Wednesday, May 12th – Cara Chace – How to Fix Your Pinterest Strategy if It’s Not Working

    Wednesday, May 12th – Erik Deckers – Content Marketing Secrets Learned From the Giants of Fiction< — I WILL ALSO BE DOING A FACEBOOK LIVE Q&A AT 3 PM EDT THAT DAY. (Be sure to join the group early so you can just show up at 3PM

    Thursday, May 13th – Mike Allton – How to Create 10x Content 10x Faster

    Thursday, May 13th – Kelsey Formost – 5 Steps to Start and Grow Your List

    Friday, May 14th – Jessika Phillips – How to Capture Attention, Amplify Your Message, and Keep Them Coming Back for More

    Friday, May 14th – Lisa Sicard – Alternative Social Media Networks: Where Are Your Ideal Customers Hanging Out?

    Saturday, May 15th – Joe Pulizzi – How to Use Content to Accomplish What Few Can Achieve: Build Your Business Into an Empire

    Sunday, May 16th – Ashleigh McGarity – How to Make Must-Read Headlines That Will Attract 438% More Traffic to Your Website

Blogging for Your Business - featuring Erik Deckers

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What is the Ideal Paragraph Length?

What’s the ideal paragraph length? Is there an ideal paragraph length? Are there hard-and-fast rules that govern how long our paragraphs — “grafs,” if you’re cool and/or “in the biz” — or can you just create paragraphs of different lengths willy-nilly, like some damn hippie?

The latest episode of Grammar Girl’s podcast opened with this horrifying story:

At one university, a professor will measure what he or she thinks is an ideal paragraph length. This is a photo of a section of a tape measure.

A while ago, I saw a comment on Facebook about professors who are teaching college students to make all their paragraphs the same length. The woman wrote, “There are professors at my school who deduct points, sometimes even letter grades, if paragraphs aren’t the same exact length throughout a paper. Because writing should be ‘balanced’ and it can only achieve ‘balance’ if all paragraphs are equal in length.”

Since this is one of the most preposterous things I’ve ever heard, I thought I must have misunderstood, but I asked for clarification and learned that the “uniform paragraph length rule” is so pervasive at this university that one professor uses a ruler to measure physical paragraph length in an introductory English class.

Let me say it right now, upfront.

There is no one ideal paragraph length.

According to Grammar Girl, both the Yahoo! Style Guide and the college handbook A Writer’s Reference (affiliate links) say the ideal paragraph length is between 100 and 200 words. However, “good writers treat this as a suggestion and not a hard and fast rule.”

The problem is, we live in an age of skimmers, not readers. If you’re a content marketer, blogger, or essayist, you don’t have the luxury of getting people to dig into a block of text between 100 and 200 words. Large blocks of text without any white space make our eyes glaze over — at least mine do — and we just zone out and get the early morning stares. A big block of text just looks boring as shit. People ignore long paragraphs because they’re dense, so we should avoid cramming in that many words, of which this is the 100th.

Seriously, that graf is exactly 100 words long.

That one was eight.

And that one was four.

Do you see the difference? Do you feel how much easier it felt to read the short one-sentence paragraphs instead of that 100-word monstrosity?

Like it or not, people don’t read, they skim. They prefer short paragraphs, not long chunks of text. Sure, you can slip them in once in a while, but people tend not to read them. Did you even notice I said “shit” in that 100-word paragraph up there?

Unfortunately, writing teachers tend to give young writers bad advice, which is why there are “rules” about paragraph length.

Just remember, there’s the right way to write, and the school way. And the two are frequently different.

Paragraphs Aren’t a Part of Your System, Man!

Paragraphs can — and should — be varying lengths. If you want to write 200-word paragraphs, go ahead. If you think you can manage several 200-word paragraphs in a row, be my guest. But I’ll bet if you were to do a heat map or readability study of your work, you’d find that very few people are slogging their way through that bog.

There are already several “rules of English” that we can safely ignore. Either they’re obsolete, the language has changed, or they never should have been a rule in the first place.

I’ll admit, I’m not a big fan of some of the changes that are happening to the English language. Like the fact that “literally” now means figuratively. (Seriously, go to Google and enter “define literally!” That irritates me to no end!)

A screenshot of Google's search for the phrase Define literally. It says used for emphasis to express strong feelings while not being literally true.Conversely, some things were incorrect in the first place, and they’re only now being fixed, like the whole “don’t end your sentence with a preposition” thing.

Teaching students that a paragraph must be of a certain length is also terrible teaching. Good writing will have paragraphs of varying length, from a couple hundred words (Yeesh!) to just one word. To teach otherwise is a disservice to your students because many of them will go through life thinking it’s a requirement when at best, it’s a guideline.

And before you tell me, “You have to learn the rules before you break them,” I would say 1) there’s not a real rule about paragraph length, and 2) you can teach people that paragraph lengths vary without blowing their minds.

They can make the leap from not knowing how long a graf is to knowing that it can be different. You don’t have to spend an entire semester teaching them this one rule, only to tell them, “Just kidding!” at some undetermined point in the future.

Bottom line: there’s no ideal paragraph length, and you can make them any size you want.

Seriously.

Photo credit: Qimono (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

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Content Marketers Need to Study Sportswriters

Sportswriters are some of the best writers around.

Period, end of sentence.

Especially the sports columnists.

Go into any newsroom anywhere, and read samples of the best work from each writer, and the sports columnists will have some of the best writing in the entire room.

That’s because they’re some of the best storytellers around. They can tell a story about any person, pulling on a tiny thread in a person’s life, and discover some of the most interesting, little-known revelations about a person that lives such a public-but-unknown life.

They’re the ones who ask an NFL running back about his mom and write about how she worked three jobs but never missed a game. They write about a pitcher’s relationship with his dad, and how they still talk on the phone after every game. They tell you about how a basketball player missed her senior year of high school with a knee injury and spent nine months in painful rehab just to be able to walk again, let alone get drafted in the first round.

Anyone who’s a fan of sports, a fan of good writing, or both, knows the sports columnists who have a mastery of the language, can tell a great story, and pull something interesting out of tiny details. These are a few of my favorites:

Grantland Rice, one of the best sportswriters in history
Grantland Rice, considered by many to be the father of long-form journalism.
  • Tom Junod, the guy who wrote the Mr. Rogers story, Can You Say Hero?, that made me cry three times as I read it. (It’s the story that got turned into the Tom Hanks movie.)
  • Tom Verducci, baseball writer extraordinaire. When Hank Aaron died this past January, there was only one person Sports Illustrated could ask to write his obituary. If you only like baseball a little bit, read Tom Verducci; he’ll make you love it.
  • Pat Jordan. I’m reading his Tom Seaver And Me book right now. I picked it up with the intention of reading two pages on a quick break from work today and ended up reading for 30 minutes.
  • Roger Angell, the centenarian baseball writer for the New Yorker, and the guy who made me believe in long sentences again. I have five of Roger’s books and am always on the lookout for more. His story, “Three for the Tigers is my favorite Angell story, and his line “Everything you do in life, you do so that your son will go to ball games with you, and then he doesn’t want to,” broke my heart.
  • Jemele Hill takes shit from no one. She called Donald Trump a white supremacist in 2017 and would not apologize. She even worked here in Orlando as a columnist for the Orlando Sentinel for two years. She writes about social justice issues in sports and makes me understand how the two are related.
  • Sally Jenkins’ stories on the NCAA, tennis, golf, and women’s sports has earned her numerous Sports Columnist of the Year awards. Her February 5th column on Patrick Mahomes made me question whether he could outthink Peyton Manning, and whether I wanted to become a Patrick Mahomes fan.
  • You can hear interviews with many of these writers on Jeff Pearlman’s Two Writers Slinging Yang podcast. If you want to be any kind of writer, every episode of this podcast has a nugget of great writing advice. And his book on the USFL (Football For A Buck is the definitive history on the renegade league of the early 1980s.

There are dozens — hundreds, even — of writers I could name, but I don’t have the room. These are just a few of my favorites, but I’ve got a few dozen sports books from a variety of writers, some on topics I know nothing about. Even if I’m not a fan of the sport or the athlete, I’m a fan of the writer.

(My one non-sportswriter recommendation would be Dave Thompson’s book, Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell: The Dangerous Glitter of David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed.)

Why Should Content Marketers Study Sportswriters?

I’ve often said that content marketers need to read daily

I’ve also said they need to stop reading blogs.

Bad writing breeds bad writing, and reading bad writing will infect you with bad habits and sloppy tendencies. Most blogs tend to be poorly written — read my post “Half of All Written Content Online is Sh*t” — and you’re not going to improve by reading someone worse than you.

Instead, I usually recommend that content marketing writers read fiction books by established writers. Find your favorite writers and genres and devour several of them. Pay attention to their writing style and voice, and figure out how you can steal emulate parts of their style.

But you can also find some of the best creative non-fiction writing among the sportswriters and sports columnists. Pick a few and learn their style, then expand to their colleagues and see what it is that they do so well. Pick up one of The Best American Sportswriting annual books (or get The Best American Sportswriting of the Century) and read what some of the finest sportswriters in the country have done.

Then, once you have your favorites, find out who their idols and favorite writers were, and read their work. And if you can, find out those writers’ idols and inspirations, and read their stuff. I’m now reading works by Ring Lardner from the 1910s and 1920s, and Red Smith from the 1930s – 1970s, as I follow the sportswriting family tree to its roots.

Who are your favorite sportswriters? What’s one sportswriter you want to read more of or learn more about? Do you have a favorite or one you don’t like at all? Share your comments.