Pro Blog Service

You are here: Home / Archives for All Posts / Blogging / Blog Writing

Blog Writing

By

3 Secrets of Creating Effective and SAFE Humor for Your Writing

I’ve been writing newspaper humor columns for over 17 years.

And I can tell you one of the hardest things to do is to be funny week after week. So hard that I can’t always do it. In fact, I slacked off for six months in 1998, but apparently no one noticed.

Sarah Schaefer at 92Y Tribeca Comedy Festival

But I have learned a few secrets about writing humor over the years, based on how humor itself works. These aren’t just the “rule of three” or “end words in a hard K” tricks, but the psychological motivation of humor. If you can learn how to write jokes using these secrets, you can start safely adding humor to your blogs, your articles, or your presentations.

(I have to give special thanks to my dad, Dr. Lambert Deckers, a psychology professor who studied the motivation of humor for a number of years, and Dick Wolfsie, fellow humor writer and features reporter for WISH-TV, for teaching me all of this. I totally stole all of this information from them.)

Humor Rule #1: All Humor is Based on a Surprise

The Purdue University linguist Victor Raskin wrote that all humor is based on a surprise, or a lie. That is, comedians lie to us by setting us up with one premise, and then lie to us (or surprise us) with the punchline. The laugh comes from the surprise.

Here’s an example: writer Dorothy Parker once famously said, “If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

Did you see it? As you started reading Parker’s line, by the time you got to “laid end to end,” your mind already started thinking about what was going to come next, like a measurement of distance: “they would stretch across campus” or something similar. But she surprised us by instead questioning the moral virtue of the girls who attended the Yale prom. And that’s where the laugh came from.

This type of sentence is called a paraprosdokian, which is from the Greek meaning “expectation.”

However, not all surprises are paraprosdokian in nature. There are times when endings are just unexpected, but didn’t require a single sentence to get there. Most punchlines to jokes are surprises, which is what makes them humorous.

If you want to add a joke to your posts, throw in a surprise thought or two, almost as a parenthetical statement, at the end of a paragraph where a punchline would typically sit.

Humor Rule #2: Good Humor is Based on Recognition

Writing a punchline that requires previous knowledge of the source material is a great way to get a laugh. If the audience is already familiar with the source of a punchline, the reason behind it, the source it references, or if it’s something they’ve experienced before, you’ll get a laugh. For example, telling computer jokes to a bunch of IT geeks will get a laugh, but telling the same joke to a bunch of fashion models won’t. The way Dick Wolfsie explained it, the reader feels like they’re in on the joke, which makes them feel good, and they laugh.

I can't help it, I was REALLY proud of this one.

Here’s an example: As I was writing this post, my friend Rhett Cochran started the #LessIconicMovieLines meme on Twitter. Several of us threw out suggestions based on memorable movie lines. The movie lines that did the best were fairly popular ones — you couldn’t use lines from a movie no one had seen, like Ishtar — and they were surprising enough to be funny.

This is also why “callbacks” work so well: they “call back” to something that was said earlier. A lot of standup comics use callbacks during their act. When the audience recognizes the joke, and remembers where it came from, they feel like they were in on it, and the joke scores.

A lot of character-driven sitcoms rely on recognition for their humor. You get to know their characters, their foibles, their tendencies, their likes and dislikes. Then, whenever they’re placed in a particular situation that draws on one of those facets, it’s funny. But when a different character is placed into the same situation, it won’t be funny.

Recognition is also why jokes often fall flat, especially when you tell inside jokes to someone who wasn’t there. If you have to say “I guess you had to be there,” that’s a good indication the joke won’t be funny.

Humor Rule #3: Humor is Based on Making the Reader Feeling Superior. Good Humor is Self-Deprecating

Making a reader feel superior is another key to humor. Basically, if I feel smarter, better, prettier, richer, or more successful than the subject of the joke, the joke scores. It can often piggy-back off Recognition. That is, if I understand the inside joke or the callback, then I feel smarter, like I’m in on something special, and I’ll laugh.

However, this is where a lot of humor can be dangerous, and I urge you to use it carefully. It’s why people are told to avoid using humor at all. People love to make jokes at someone else’s expense, and end up offending somebody (or a whole lot of somebodies). It’s one thing to make a joke about a single person, but then it becomes tempting to make a joke about a group of people — computer geeks, people from a neighboring state — which can then turn into jokes about race, disability, size, etc., which then creates all kinds of problems.

To safely follow this rule, never, ever make a joke at someone else’s expense, because it will promptly backfire. Don’t think it won’t happen? Think back carefully to that one awful cringe moment in your life where you made a joke about a friend, only to discover that the punchline was related to some childhood condition, sensitive subject they’re in counseling about, or the tragic death of a loved one. (Congratulations if you only have one of those.)

In essence, if your humor has to rely on someone else feeling bad, then don’t do it.

There is one exception where it’s okay to violate this rule: if you make fun of yourself, you are completely safe. By making fun of yourself, the authority, you’re making the audience feel superior to you. I used this in the last sentence of the first paragraph, “In fact, I slacked off for six months in 1998, but apparently no one noticed.”

This is a great trick used by public speakers. By being up on stage, speaking to the audience from a position of authority, they are in the power position. So good speakers will make fun of themselves, which makes the audience feel like they’re superior to the speaker, and the joke scores.

There are several other humor secrets you can use, like exaggeration, being outrageous, or absurd, that can also make your writing or speaking funny.

In a future post, I’ll discuss how to string a few small jokes together to make your next presentation or blog post rock.

At least from a humor perspective. If you suck at speaking, I can’t help you.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

Photo credit: Sarah Schaefer, 92YTribeca (Flickr)
Twitter screenshot: Erik Deckers

By

Four Professional Secrets to Ignite Your Writing

Do you want to make your writing sing?

Do you want it to be passionate, emotional, and to move scores of people to action? Do you want to write your barbaric yawp! over the screens of the world? Here are four professional secrets I’ve used over the years to help ignite my own writing.

Alliteration, Assonance, and Consonance

Writing can be memorable just with a little bit of alliteration. It can lighten the mood, and make a piece light-hearted without being silly or funny. Alliteration is where the first sound of a word are the same — crazy cars, beautiful beaches. Consonance is where internal consonants sound the same — Errant Erik — while assonance is where internal vowels sound the same — awful coffee, fair sherry.

One of my writers recently submitted a post about snow plows entitled “How Now Snow Plow,” which set a lighter mood for the entire piece, and we were able to do something a little lighter about something that’s usually very, well, not light.

Metaphors and Similes

Regular readers know I love metaphors. Metaphors are what give language its richness, its vividness. In the family of language, they’re the Wild Adventurer, that crazy uncle who lives exciting adventures searching for ancient treasure.

Similes, on the other hand, are the English teacher. The weak-chinnned, bespectacled, and slightly timid English teacher. They repeat, relate, and give you an idea of something, but they don’t actually do the thing they’re telling you about. (See, that there is a metaphor.)

“Life is like a box of chocolates,” said Forrest Gump. Meh. Sure, it’s nice, and it’s memorable, but it doesn’t bring anything to life.

But, “men’s words are bullets, that their enemies take up and make use of against them,” said George Savile in Maxims of State.

How sad, that life itself is reduced to a simple simile — a box of chocolates — while mere words can be bullets in the hands of our enemies. A well-turned metaphor can provide a thunderous impact to your writing.

Having said all that, similes can also be a powerful device. Think of any hard-boiled private detective story, when a sexy client entered the office — “She had legs like smooth alabaster towers that rose straight up to the heavens” — and you can see what similes can do for your writing.

While I recommend metaphors in your writing, similes will do in a pinch. But don’t rely on either device too much.

Hyperbole

Walt Whitman’s famous line from Leaves of Grass — his “barbaric yawp” — is surrounded by hyperbole. Hyperbole is an exaggeration that is not meant to be taken literally.

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me—he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable;
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me;
It flings my likeness after the rest, and true as any, on the shadow’d wilds;
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I love the hyperbole here: a hawk accuses and complains, Whitman shouts over the roofs of the world, and the last scud of day flings his likeness. He’s not saying the hawk’s cries sound like accusations or complaints (which would make it a weak-chinned simile). He’s not saying he wishes his cries would ring out over the roofs of the world, or that they can only be heard 100 yards away. And a scud in Whitman’s day was when a ship runs before a strong wind, but with little sail set. So can it really fling things, especially a person’s likeness?

Whitman’s hyperbole, and excellent use of metaphor, make Leaves of Grass one of the most memorable pieces of literature from the 19th century.

Action Verbs

While I normally hate business jargon that gets turned into verbs, I love using action verbs, or even taking similes and turning them into verbs.

Last year, I gave a presentation on “10 Techniques to Rocket Your Blog to Success.” The verb phrase “rocket your blog” was a whole lot more dramatic and powerful than “make your blog take off like a rocket.”

By using the word “rocket” as a verb, I was able to create an image of power and speed, and give the idea that this was something important and powerful.

Even the verb in this post’s headline — ignite — is a lot better than the others I could have chosen: improve, help, boost, embiggen. None of them gave the impression of, well, lighting a fire under your writing. (Five cool points to anyone who can tell me what literary device I just used in that last sentence.)

So, these are just four techniques that I use to help my own writing. What are some of the ones you use? How do you punch up your own writing, and make it memorable? Share your ideas in the comments.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

By

Five Advanced Techniques to Help Your Blog

This is not one of those posts that restates the same damn advice you get in all the other “Grow Your Blog” posts.

I will not tell you to “write good content” or “promote your blog to your social networks.” That advice is so worn out, even the Amish roll their eyes whenever they hear it.

So I won’t share lessons from the Mr. Obvious School of Blogging. But these are five advanced techniques you should consider. They will either grow your readership, improve your search rankings, or both.

1) Find a deep niche. Not just a semi-vague niche — like “Italian cooking” — but a deeper one, like “gluten free Italian cooking.” While “food” is a hugely generic topic, and “cooking” is a little more specific, even a style of cooking is still too broad. But if you can get to one specific detail, you’ll dominate that market. While it may be a long-tail search, keep in mind that there are still thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people looking for that niche.

2) Create backlinks from other sites. Any search engine optimization specialist is going to tell you that backlinks are crucial to improving your search engine rankings. Yes, onsite optimization is important — keywords in the title, anchor text, etc. — but backlinks are the best way to optimize your site, because you’re telling the search engines your site is very popular.

The easiest way to generate backlinks are going to be via comments, but be aware that this is not a powerful way to create them. Comment links don’t have as much juice as a link on another blog. Write guest posts on other blogs, get people to reference you in other posts, and participate in forum discussions related to your blog’s topic.

If you can get your links on a site with a high pagerank (use WebRank Toolbar or other pagerank monitoring tools), all the better. Also, getting a link on a .gov website will carry more weight than a .info or .biz site, especially if that .info/.biz site is only a year old. (Google gives more weight to domains that are more than a year old, and have been purchased for more than a year.)

3) Create a secondary blog to create keyword-rich backlogs. The best way to control your backlinks is to create a second blog on a completely different platform or server, and point it back at your original site. Set something up on Posterous, WordPress.com, or even Blogger, and create content that is about the very same thing your site is about.

It’s important that you put new, original content on this second site. Don’t just run an old blog post through an article spinner, or make a few edits to a post. You need to write completely new blog posts. They don’t have to be terribly long: 250 words or so. But they should be about the topic of your primary blog, and should link back to that primary blog. (Be sure to link only a particular keyword or phrase. Don’t link to an entire sentence or extra unrelated words.)

4) Use article marketing. Article sites like Ezine.com and others are a great way to repurpose some of your writing, and build backlinks. The premise is the same as writing for a secondary blog and pointing it to your primary blog. However, unlike a second blog, you don’t have to put as much work into an article. Take an old post, rewrite and rearrange it, and then submit it to some article sites, all which will point back to your primary blog.

5) Submit to social sharing sites. The biggest spike in my blog’s traffic in the last year came when a post I wrote for my humor blog, “Understanding 7 Different Kinds of Humor,” hit the front page of StumbleUpon.com, and got 700 visits in 2 days. In fact, nearly 40% of my regular traffic comes from my StumbleUpon submissions, so anytime I write a new humor post, I always submit it to StumbleUpon.

This does two things for me: first, it builds a backlink from a highly-popular website (Pagerank of 8), and second, it introduces my site to a whole new group of readers. Many readers visit once and never return, but I have also gained a lot of regular readers who read my new posts or subscribe to my RSS feed.

Other sites like Digg, Delicious, and even Bloggers.com can all build backlinks and gain new readers as well.

While there are other advanced blogging techniques, these are the five I use over and over, whether it’s on my own blog or on our client blogs.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available on Amazon.com, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstores. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy.

Photo credit: Svenwerk (Flickr)

By

Do You Know Where to Tap the Hammer?

A parable.

A business owner is horrified to discover one morning that her company’s server is broken. Won’t boot up, won’t turn on. She calls a computer repair expert to come out and see what he can do.

The expert shows up, looks at the machine carefully, and even gives it a careful listen. He runs his fingers lightly on the side of the computer, and then taps it with a small hammer. The computer starts right up, the business owner is happy, and the expert goes away.

If I had this hammer, man, I could fix ANYTHING!

Two days later, the expert’s bill shows up. “Computer repair, $500,” it says.

The business owner calls up the expert, angry. “$500?! All you did was tap the computer, and you charged me $500?! I need to see an itemized version of your bill, to see why you thought that was worth $500.”

Two days later, the new bill arrives in the mail. “Tapping the computer with a hammer, $1. Knowing where to tap the hammer, $499.”

Knowing Where to Tap the Hammer: The Moral

Once, I was talking to a freelance writer friend, and she was worried about charging too much for her services.

“I don’t see how I can charge that much an hour, just to write a single press release,” she said, like she was worried she would be found out as a fraud, or that people would realize anyone could do it.

“Do you have special knowledge that enables you to write that press release in under an hour?”

“Oh sure, I’ve done so many of these, I can write them in 30 minutes sometimes.”

“And do you think your clients could write that same release in under an hour?”

“No, they take 3 or 4 hours to write one.”

So I told her the computer hammer story.

“You know where to tap the computer,” I said. “Your job seems easy to you because you’ve done it for years. But to someone who has never done it, it seems daunting. But then if they see how easy it is for you, they assume it’s that easy for anyone. But if they don’t know how to do it, it’s still a mystery.”

What can you do better than anyone else? What is a special piece of knowledge that you have that could be valuable to someone else? What are you putting your energy and time into?

For me, it’s writing. For Lorraine Ball, it’s PR for small businesses. For Paul D’Andrea, it’s portraits and event photography.

For us hammer tappers, we’re always learning new stuff, new tools and techniques, new ways of doing things.

Knowing where to tap the hammer is what sets us apart from those of us who will try the same things over and over — flipping the computer off and on, trying it in different plugs, shaking it — before declaring it impossible to finish.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available for pre-order on Amazon.com. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy, who I also helped write Twitter Marketing For Dummies (another affiliate link).

Photo credit: KyleMay (Flickr)

By

Your Blog Openings Suck: Four Blog Leads to Avoid

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last three weeks, you know about the two big gamma ray emitting bubbles that US astronomers found at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

No you don’t. That’s just stupid.

I hate it when blog posts start out with the overused phrase “unless you’ve been living under a rock” followed up by some assumption that “everyone” knows about this, except for hermits and Tom Hanks’ character from Cast Away.

BLEAH!!!

The problem is that because we don’t all read the same newspapers and blogs (I had to search to find something to put into this opening, because even I didn’t know about the gamma ray bubbles), we all have different sets of knowledge. The best thing to do is to assume your audience doesn’t know. “Write for the person who just woke up out of a coma,” my journalism professor used to say.

The writer who uses this opening is making a dangerous assumption that a) everyone knows what he or she knows, and b) their readers won’t find it insulting that they didn’t know this.

Here are four openings you should avoid in your blog posts, because they’re overused, insulting, or not enjoyable to read.

1. The Rock/Cave Dweller

I’ve already ranted about this, so I don’t need to go into it anymore, other than to say I’ve seen this from a couple professional PR bloggers who should know better. Unless you’ve been in a coma for three years, you know who you are.

2. The Recipe Opener.

Take one cup of overused cliche, two tablespoons of tired old trope, and two equal parts of “GAAAH!” and “please kill me now!” Mix thoroughly, and you have a recipe for my least favorite opener. This one is just tiresome and plodding. It was cute the first time I ever saw it in high school, but the 5,000 times since then just make me want to bite my own neck.

It can be used for any story, in any industry, and any publication. And often is.

3. Once Upon a time

I fell prey to this again and again when I first started writing. The inclination is to write like we talk, and we often tell stories to make a point. And where does a story start? Right at the beginning. So I would open a column or article by starting at square one and explaining how I got to to the important lesson of the piece. (See, I even did it to start out this particular paragraph.)

Write your blog posts like a journalist writes a story. The most important part of the story should be the very first sentence. The lead should answer who, what, when, where, why, and how in the first sentence or two. It should not start out with “so I was sitting in a coffee shop with my friend Dave. . .”

4. Stalling

I’m sick of seasonal openers that have nothing to do with the blog post.

The TSA had a stunner on a recent post about their Secure Flight program.

November 1st is right around the corner and with that date comes cooler weather, fall foliage and the seemingly never ending battle between rake and leaf. It also marks the end of the year-long grace period for airlines to clear their systems of old reservations made before TSA’s Secure Flight requirements took effect last year.

The post is not about the autumn colors, cool weather, or the blister-raising tedium of leaf raking. So why even mention it? In fact, the TSA post doesn’t even mention it ever again. Your lead needs to be about the topic, not about the time of year that have nothing to do with what you do.

What bad openers have you seen? What are some good ones? Leave some examples in the comments section and let me know.

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available for pre-order on Amazon.com. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy, who I also helped write Twitter Marketing For Dummies (another affiliate link).

Photo credit: Zakmc (Flickr)

By

Five Reasons Why Attorneys Should Blog

I’m surprised at the number of attorneys who aren’t blogging.

If there was any form of communication made for attorneys, it’s blogging. It’s not a website, not TV, and certainly not the Yellow Pages. Here are five reasons why private practice attorneys should be blogging.

  1. You show up higher on local search engine results. Many people are forgoing their Yellow Pages in favor of Google. And Google will automatically give results from your current location, not where they think you live. So if someone looks for an intellectual property attorney in Indianapolis (like my friend Matt Schantz), Matt may or may not appear at the top of Google’s results.
  2. You demonstrate your knowledge and experience in your particular field. If you specialize in corporate law for green companies, you should be writing about green issues. For example, if you wanted to specialize in working with alternative energy, you should be writing about alternative energy law, alternative energy news, and even Congressional bills that may affect alt. energy companies. The net result is that you’ll be seen as one of the leading voices for the industry, and more likely to be called whenever a company needs your advice.
  3. It’s a way to build your personal and professional brand without spending a lot of money advertising. It’s also a way to market yourself while staying within your state bar association’s rules. For example, we have a Kentucky law firm as a client, and we know that as long as we’re offering information (see point #2), and not providing legal advice, we’re within their guidelines. And our client still gets the benefit, because they’re beginning to win local searches for their specialty, and being seen as an expert in their particular field.
  4. It’s a way to learn new information. The old “see one, do one, teach one” model comes to mind here. If you read something, you may know it, but if you have to explain it to someone else, you’ll truly understand it. This also forces you to find something new to write about on a regular basis. It keeps you up to date on your chosen specialty, by reading different news articles, law journals, case law, and court decisions.
  5. You can improve your writing. Your blog should not be written for other attorneys, it should be written for clients. And your clients don’t talk or read like attorneys, so they don’t do “wherefore, whereas, and heretofore.” They do “if, except, and until now.” The best way to create tight, easy-to-understand plain English is to be forced to do it every couple of days

Photo credit: umjanedoan (Flickr)