Pro Blog Service

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

Writing

By

Five Terrible Ways to Start a Blog Article and Five Good Ways

As a content writer, I cringe and writhe in pain when I see some content marketers’ openings — ledes, in journalism parlance — of their blog posts and journal articles. They’re cheap, amateurish, and they say absolutely nothing. They’re terrible ways to start a blog article, and they can wreck what might have been an otherwise good piece.

They’re so overused and hackneyed, I’m just embarrassed for them.

It’s one thing if they tried this lede in college and got a warm, squishy feeling about it, but the problem is no one told them not to do it again, and so they stuck with it.

Wait, wait! What’s a “lede?”

Lede (pronounced “leed”) is the intentional spelling of the word lead. However, you don’t always know how “lead” is pronounced until you know its context.

According to newspaper legend, reporters — whose stories were cast in lead (“led”) type — wanted to avoid confusion with the opening lines to their stories. And so people wouldn’t get confused and say lead instead of lead. Since they wrote a lead that was cast in lead, they needed to signify the difference. So they started using “lede” to mean the opening paragraph (“graf”) and “lead” to mean the soft metal.

But that’s not what you came here for.

The Five Terrible Ways to Start a Blog Article

1. Let’s face it.
I hate this one because it feels forced and we have to reluctantly accept what life has done to us. Like you and I have been going around and around trying to find our way out of a Locked Room game, and we don’t have the first clue to get out.

I’ll almost buy using this phrase near the end of an article, but not at the beginning.

2. Unless you’ve been under a rock.
I overheard someone use this on an anime podcast recently, talking about an anime movie that I had never even heard of. Basically, unless I had been living under a rock, I would know about this whole big kerfuffle surrounding this movie I’d never heard of.

This lede is actually rude because it insinuates your reader is a moron.

“Only a true moron wouldn’t know about this thing I’m about to tell you.”

My response to these is rude and vulgar, so I won’t repeat it.

3. The recipe lede.
“Take three part X, two parts Y, and one part Z, mix them together and you’ve got [insert story theme].” Blurg!

This one is hackneyed and overused. It works in nearly every situation, which means it’s not good for any of them. Gag me with a mixing spoon.

4. The high school research paper.
This is the one that gets directly to the point in the most boring way possible, usually as a way to shoehorn keywords into the opening paragraph.

“Most businesses need an accounting and bookkeeping system. Keeping track of your finances is the most important job for any business, and accounting software will help you do this.”

Sure, it’s factual, it’s to the point, and it’s so dull, it couldn’t cut through water.

A better lede might start with, “Entrepreneurs, do you remember when you started your business and all your invoices were done in Word and you hammered together some kind of balance sheet on Excel?” See the difference?

5. Statistics.
“There are 7 million blog articles published every day.”

You could lump this one with the high school paper lede. It’s informative, but it’s not exciting. I might appreciate that fact (which is true), but it doesn’t pull me into the story with any emotion. If you want me to care, tell me about one of those bloggers, not all 7 million of them.

Also, clicking that link takes you a real stinker of a lede — it’s written only for SEO purposes, and if I wasn’t promised a raft full of blogging stats, I wouldn’t read a word more of it:

“This article will reveal the most interesting blogging stats, facts, and trends. And answer the most common questions.”

Blurg!

The Five Good Ways to Start a Blog Article

So how should you start a blog article if you want it to be effective and interesting?

1. The Hard News Lede This actually is a boring way to start a story, but it’s soooo much better than any of the ones I mentioned above. Go look at a newspaper’s website and read some of the articles in their News section. They’ll all start with the hard news lede.

In this kind of lede, you answer the 5 W’s and 1 H: Who, what, where, when, why, and how. (Sometimes called the 6 W’s, where the how is replaced with “what significance.”)

Here’s an example:

“John Smith was shot as he tried to stop a hold-up attempt at KFC at 1234 Main Street at 12:38 pm. He was taken to Polk Memorial Hospital and listed in stable condition.”

You’ve got all 5 W’s and the H in that first sentence. (I just threw in the second sentence so you’d know John was OK. He appreciates your well-wishes.)

It’s not exciting, but it’s informative and well-done.

2. The “Features” Lede
The news lede is boring, but the features lede is much more interesting. In fact, features stories tend to be much more interesting than hard news stories.

“All John Smith wanted was a bucket of chicken. What he got was a trip to the hospital and a bullet wound to the thigh.”

They look at the Why of most news stories in general — this is where you find the interesting details about a news story. Investigative reporting happens here. Sports features happen here. Human interest. Historical stories. Social/community stories.

For a look at a great lede in a Pulitzer-winning story, check out the Tampa Bay Tribune’s Insane. Invisible. In Danger. stories, written by Leonora LaPeter Anton, Anthony Cormier, and Michael Braga.

3. Telling a story.
I don’t mean a long, meandering, 4-volume epic about Memaw’s Potato Salad preceding the actual recipe. But a nice 100-word story that builds tension or sets the stage for the information you’re about to impart.

Content marketers like to call themselves “storytellers,” yet they fail to tell a single story in all of their writing. I don’t mean just tell a story like, “That time I got lost in a foreign city with my dad.” You can tell brief stories to set the stage to a bigger idea. Story #3 in the Tampa Bay “Insane. Invisible. In Danger.” series does that in just seven grafs. Surely you can do that!

4. Look, stupid!
Now, let me stress that I do not recommend that you actually start a blog article with this phrase.

Rather, this is a great way to kick off an article when you’re stuck for a starting point. I’ve used this to kick off many how-to and informative articles. I could have started this article with:

“Look, stupid!

“Writing the opening of a blog article isn’t that hard, but that doesn’t mean you can be lazy about it. You need to grab your reader from the very first words, which means you can’t just phone in the lede.”

I write “Look, stupid!” then write the lede, and then go back and delete those first two words. The opening gets me exasperated with the reader and I can adopt an “I-love-you-but-you’re-killing-me-Smalls” tone. The lede is forceful, direct, and gets straight to the point.

5. The mystery.
Build a mystery with your opening and promise to solve it for the reader sometime before the end. Make sure the mystery is enticing — you can help that along by telling a story — and that the payoff is worth it.

“I remember going on a road trip with a friend in college. We drove 1,000 miles west with no real destination in mind and no idea what we would find. We just knew we wanted to leave Indiana for a week. What we found — and who we picked up on the way — changed our lives and sent us careening off the carefully-laid plans our parents had made for us.”

Isn’t that exciting? Don’t you want to know where we went, what we found, and who we picked up? I’ll bet that if I started a blog post that way, you’d gobble up the entire article trying to find out all the answers to the questions.

Unfortunately, it’s here at the end of the piece, and I’ve run out of time, so I guess you’ll never know.

(Just kidding. I made that stuff up.)

There are already 7 million blog articles being published each day, so there’s no point in trying to match the same level of boring mediocrity as everyone else. Stop using those bad ledes to start a blog article, because they’re just making your work sound terrible. A good blog post starts with a good lede and builds from there.

Write great ledes and the rest will follow.

Photo credit: Creative_Tomek (Pixabay, Creative Commons 0)

By

Writers Don’t Need Special Fancy Writing Apps

I’m a bit jealous of all the cool apps that other creative professionals get to use to do their job. Graphic designers get Photoshop and InDesign, or they can go low budget and use GIMP and Sketch.

Photographers get to use all this cool technology to take great pictures. Even podcasters and music producers can have these great big studios, digital recorders, soundboards, and editing software.

All I get is a word processor program on my laptop.

To be fair, all those other pieces of technology that the designers, photographers, and producers use are pretty expensive.

My photographer friends need a pricey camera, expensive lenses, and all kinds of lighting. My graphic designer friends need a beefed-up computer and a monthly software subscription. Meanwhile, I can do my job with a golf pencil and the back of an envelope.

But at the same time, all I get is a lousy word processor? Why don’t I get any cool tools?

It’s not like I can upgrade as I get better, switching to a better word processor. A beginning writer can sit down with a copy of Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, or OpenOffice, or they can even go online and use Google Docs. And the pros use the exact same programs.

I started writing with Apple’s MacWrite program, sticking with it as it spun off to ClarisWorks, and stayed with it when it became AppleWorks. Then Apple switched to Pages, and I went right along with it. So I’m vastly familiar with Apple’s offerings for word processing. I can tell you that not much has changed over the years. There are new functions and capabilities, but at its heart, it’s still just a writing program — the new functions don’t help people write better.

I sometimes wish we had cool writing apps that made the same technological leaps and bounds as Photoshop and Illustrator, but the ability to create written words hasn’t really progressed much beyond a keyboard and a screen. That’s a major change from a typewriter and paper, but other than that, we don’t get the cool tools.

Of course, we don’t need them. I see plenty of “distraction-free writing apps” that promise to elevate our writing and help us create a better writing environment. Except we don’t need it.

Yes, a simplified word processor would be nice, but if that’s all you really needed, just use the Text program that came free with your Mac or Windows’ free Notepad program.

You don’t need some fancy app that makes writing sound like a mysterious, mystical process that can only be improved with the right kind of technology.

That’s like saying I’ll be a better writer if I just switched pens. Or that Agatha Christie could have been a better writer if she had switched from her Remington Home Portable No. 2 typewriter.

Writing apps do not improve writing skills.

Writing tools do not improve writing skills.

There are only two things that improve writing: Reading and writing.

If you want to be a better writer, then write. Practice your writing skills every day, even when you’re just writing an email. Work to make it the best email you can. Don’t just poke around and half-ass that email — that’s your practice right there, and if you don’t practice like you want to perform, you won’t be able to perform when it counts.

And when you’re not writing, you should be reading books. But don’t read blog articles and don’t read business books. Read widely and from a variety of authors and a variety of subjects.

An app won’t make you better. It may simplify the screen you’re looking at, it may cut out your distractions, but you’re still using the one skill that isn’t affected by the tools.

That’s why writers are different from other creative professionals. If someone wanted to be a professional graphic designer, their tools will make a big difference. A powerful computer makes a bigger difference to a robust graphic design program; a little Chromebook won’t cut it.

But a writer can use a Chromebook and Google Docs and function just fine. They can produce the same quality work as a $7,000 Mac Pro and 4K 40″ curved monitor. It won’t make a difference to your work, not in the same way it will to a graphic designer.

And it won’t be any better than what you can do with a $1.29 Pilot G2 pen and a Moleskine notebook.

So don’t get sucked into the hype of needing special writing apps to improve your work. Just focus on reading and the quality of your writing, even during regular work time.

By

The Future of Content Marketing Will Not Be Different

What is the future of content marketing?

I’m often asked, what will content marketing look like in the future?

People are surprised with my answer: Just like it does now.

It’s not going to be different, we’re not going to see some major new way of “consuming content” (I really loathe that phrase!), and there’s not going to be some new method of content delivery that we’re going to have to learn.

Because when you look at content at its barest essence, it’s just words, images, and sounds. That’s what it has always been, that’s what it will always be.

It was words, images, and sounds when cave dwellers drew on cave walls and grunted their delight. It was words, images, and sounds when the Ancient Greeks passed down knowledge with stories or told stories with plays. It was words, images, and sounds — well, not so much sound — when the first ever movie of a galloping horse was made or the world’s oldest surviving film, Roundhay Garden Scene, was made.

It was words, images, and sounds when newspapers, radio, and television all had their heyday and when they were replaced by blogs, videos, and podcasts.

Content marketing is no different from any other form of communication in our history. We’ve used words, images, and sounds to communicate the entire time. But the only thing that has changed has been the medium we use — the way the content gets consumed read, watched, or heard.

Content creation tools don’t matter

Eighty years ago, we had newspapers, radio shows, and movie newsreels. Television became popular 70 years ago, launching the Golden Age of Television.

And now, everything you could ever want — including samples of old newspapers, radio shows, newsreels, and TV shows — are all available on your laptop, tablet, or mobile phone.

You can read about how those media were made eighty years ago, or you can make and share a 21st-century version of it for other people to read, watch, or hear.

Because it’s still the same old words, images, and sounds.

And it won’t matter one bit how those are made. The secret to doing well at content marketing is to be able to do words, images, and sounds well.

You have to write well. You have to sound good. You have to know how to frame a photo or a video. You have to create things that are interesting. You have to know how to tell a story. You have to know how to capture your audience at the very moment they click your link.

The tools don’t matter.

I’ll say it again: THE TOOLS DON’T MATTER!

Years ago, I used to argue with people who claimed: “there’s no such thing as social media experts because the tools are too new.”

My response then is the same as it is now: I don’t have to be a tools expert, I have to be a communication expert. I have to be good at conveying a message in my chosen medium. The tools can change from week to week, and it won’t affect me one bit because I don’t have to master the tool, I just have to master the craft.

Think of it another way. A carpenter that has spent his entire life swinging a hammer isn’t less effective just because you gave him a pneumatic nailer. A chef doesn’t forget how to cook because you switch out her gas stove to an electric one. And writers aren’t suddenly reduced to creating doggerel just because they switched pens.

So when people think you need specific Mailchimp or Constant Contact experience to be an effective email marketer, that’s wrong.

When people think you need to know how to use Hubspot or WordPress to be an effective blogger, that’s completely wrong.

It’s like saying a photographer is not a good photographer because she uses Nikon and not Canon. Or that a writer is not a good writer because they use Apple Pages and not Microsoft Word.

The tool does not create quality content. WordPress and Hubspot don’t make you write well. Constant Contact doesn’t make you a good email marketer. The latest video camera doesn’t make you a good videographer any more than a great camera makes you a good photographer.

The tools do not make the artist. A good artist can make good art with crappy tools, but a bad artist cannot make good art with good tools.

So it doesn’t matter what happens to the tools: WordPress may go away. Hubspot may fall into the sea. YouTube could be eaten by a pack of hyenas.

None of that will change how content creators make their art.

If WordPress were to go away, bloggers aren’t going to be thrown for a loop or cast out on the scrap heap. We’ll just shrug our shoulders and continue to tell good stories on the new distribution method. And blogging itself won’t go away, it will just be called something else.

Podcasting won’t go away because there will be other ways to deliver episodic information and entertainment via audio distribution.

Videos won’t go away because — well, video’s just never going to go away. In fact, it just surpassed blogging and infographics as the most commonly used form of content marketing. (I’m still a little salty about it, thank you very much.)

The artists and creators will still have a way to make and distribute their work, even if the tools for that distribution go away, change, or die completely.

Remind me how is this about the future of content marketing again

My point is, when you ask about the future of content marketing, just remember, the core elements of content marketing — words, images, and sounds — are never going to change. We’re still going to read, we’re still going to watch videos and look at pictures, and we’re still going to listen to music and information.

The channels will change, the methods of production will change, and even the popularity of the content formats will change. (Freakin’ video!) But the need for quality content will never change. That’s the one constant you can count on.

So if you’re in the content creation business, just focus on improving your craft. Become the best creator you can. Learn your art so you can be one of the best creators around. Worry less about the technology, because that won’t affect whether you’re good at your job. And when the method changes, you’ll already know what you need to do.

Photo credit: Steve Shook (Flickr, Creative Commons 2.0)

By

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.

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.

By

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

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)

By

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 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.

“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.