Those of us in the business of blogging, content marketing, and otherwise writing for the web need to accept a painful truth: most people don’t actually read what we write.

Even when you discount “bounces” — people who click away almost immediately after arriving on a web page — those who read our blogs or articles usually don’t technically read them. They skim them.

While we pour our hearts into our content and would rather people appreciate every word, it’s perfectly natural for readers to skim online articles. And if you’re strategic about how you structure your content, skimming can still lead to engaging experiences and, for brands, conversions.

Instead of wishing everyone read more thoroughly, successful writing for the web means catering to skimmers so they can still understand the heart of your message. Here are three ways to do that.

1. Break Up Your Text with Subheadings

The first key to engaging online readers is using subheadings well.

At the most basic level, subheadings show the reader what is being discussed in a particular section of text so they know whether that section is relevant to them. They also break up the text, making it look more appealing to a skimmer.

Ideally, subheadings should be used frequently. Frequent subheadings give skimmers a better idea of what parts of the article they want to actually read, while also helping them feel like they can understand the gist of the article even if they don’t read it at all.

Using a lot of subheadings can also increase the chances that people will read the actual content. An article or blog post broken into several bite-sized pieces feels more digestible than one long post, even if it has the same word count.

By making each subsection feel like a quick, easy read, you may be able to trick skimmers into reading most — or even all — of your article.

Ideally, subsections should be somewhere between 3-5 paragraphs long. My personal rule of thumb is that at least one subheading should always be visible on a standard-sized screen.

2. Avoid Overly Long Paragraphs

Just as important as frequent subheadings are frequent paragraph breaks.

Long paragraphs are intimidating to the skimmer. When faced with a wall of text, people tend to prematurely check out. Short paragraphs, though, promise quick and digestible information.

While long paragraphs can be acceptable for more academic content, shorter paragraphs are generally best for blogs, content marketing posts, and similar web content. I try to aim for roughly 3-4 lines per paragraph to strike the best balance between text and white space.

Some online publications go as far as to make each sentence its own paragraph. This definitely makes a piece of content easier to skim, but I personally think it also makes the content appear more simplistic, giving the reader the impression of a bare-bones overview instead of a trustworthy resource. So unless your publication has a very pared-down tone, I’d advise against single-sentence paragraphs.

Instead, you’ll get more mileage from mostly using short-to-average paragraphs and setting off the occasional single sentence for emphasis. Notice how the first paragraph of this subsection is a single sentence, but none of the rest are. That gives the first sentence a little extra emphasis.

3. Use Lists and Other Interesting Elements

Another great way to make your content more approachable is by including lists in it.

Clickbait writers discovered the power of lists long ago — seeing a number in a piece’s title is appealing because it tells readers that they will get a specific, digestible amount of information. But you don’t have to write a clickbait-style listicle to capitalize on the impact of lists.

Finding opportunities to insert lists into your content is a great way to give readers a lot of information in a way that feels simple. At the same time, they create more white space and allow you to keep your paragraphs shorter, making your content look more digestible.

Lists are also variations in text that catch a skimmer’s eye. People automatically notice variations, so readers will pause when they see a list.

That principle — that readers notice variations — can also be applied to other disruptions in a text, like sidebars, graphics, or pull quotes. Like lists, these elements draw a skimmer’s eye and, in doing so, easily share the key information you want to impart.

Making Content that Keeps People Hooked

Reading on the web is a fundamentally different experience than reading in print. Even the most dedicated online readers will often skip large paragraphs or bounce away from long walls of text.

But creating white space, whether by adding subheads, shortening paragraphs, or inserting lists and similar elements, keeps people on your page and ensures that your key points come across.

Need support creating content that will turn skimmers into customers? Contact me to see how we can work together.

Freelancing isn’t new, but its prevalence is. In 2021, freelance work grew by an estimated $100 million over the previous year, and 36% of the labor force did some kind of freelancing.

This growth means that, among other things, hiring freelancers is a more visible and more viable option than it has been in the past. Plenty of marketers might now find themselves unsure if they should hire an employee or a freelancer for their newest content needs.

If this is something you’ve been wondering, here’s a freelancer’s take on five of the biggest benefits of getting freelance help for your content.

1. We’re Cost-Effective

To be clear, freelancers aren’t cheap — we cost more per hour or per project than a traditional employee does. But we don’t cost any more than that.

That means you don’t have to worry about paying for benefits, vacation time, or all the hours we spend answering emails instead of producing content. Even finding freelancers is cheaper than hiring traditional employees, since HR usually isn’t involved and we do most of the follow-up tasks ourselves.

A lot of people see this cost-effectiveness as an exploitative relationship, but if you’re working with a professional who knows what their work is worth in the market, it’s not. We set our rates knowing how much we need to earn to build a relationship that’s equally cost-effective for us and the business hiring us.  

2. We Save Time and Effort

Companies often try to save money by keeping their teams lean, but leanness means that when an upsurge of work comes, employees get stretched too thin. Getting stretched too thin leads to burnout and resignation. The remaining employees then have even more work on their plates, and the cycle continues.

The solution? Offload some of that extra work to a freelancer.

Often, freelancers specialize in work that takes a significant amount of time to complete. If you were to have someone in your marketing department write a white paper, for example, that could be the employee’s entire day—or several days. But that employee’s day-to-day tasks and meetings wouldn’t stop, so they would have to figure out how to cram hours of content production into an already-full schedule.

On the other hand, if you gave that assignment to a freelancer, they would have much more flexibility to fit the work into their schedule and get it delivered in a timely manner. Your employee, meanwhile, would be free to focus on their core job.

If you want to avoid the burnout and resignation crises currently plaguing businesses and keep your employees relaxed and happy, giving some of their more time-consuming tasks to a freelancer is a great way to go.

3. We’re Experts in our Fields

We wouldn’t have gone into business selling our services if we weren’t completely confident that our services were valuable. In other words, we wouldn’t be doing this if we weren’t really good at what we do.

Of course you can find expert employees, too. But many freelancers live or die by our ability to do one or two skills exceptionally well. As such, we put a lot of our professional development energy into honing and perfecting those skills. You can be reasonably confident that an established, full-time freelancer will deliver a very strong end product. 

4. We’re Exceptionally Reliable

If an employee misses a deadline, they will still have a job (unless they miss a lot of deadlines). If a freelancer misses a deadline, they have risked losing that client.

As you can probably imagine, we’re really good at meeting our deadlines.

Similarly, if an employee turns in subpar work, they’ll be given a lot of training and second chances before being let go. If we turn in subpar work, clients can easily choose to work with someone else. So, we try not to turn in subpar work.

A freelancer’s livelihood depends on whether we can deliver high-quality work on or before deadline on a consistent basis. Coasting through our work is not an option. So if you want to work with someone who will give every assignment 110%, a freelancer is a pretty good bet.

5. We’re Self-Motivated

It takes a special kind of crazy to decide to strike out into business on your own. In most cases, it’s the kind of crazy that finds making color-coded schedules fun.

I enjoy being my own boss for many reasons, but chief among them is that I enjoy challenging myself and will do so without anyone else’s prodding. Many freelancers have a similar type of drive. This particular drive may also lead us to find more efficient ways to complete tasks, suggest creative new approaches to working together, or develop interesting topics for your content.

A freelancer isn’t usually your project manager, but we are always our own project managers. As we make plans for the best way to complete your project, it can amount to roughly the same thing.

We’re not always content strategists, but we have a strategic mind that can help you find new avenues for your content once we’ve come to understand your brand.

In short, we’re not comfortable just coasting along — not just because we can’t, as I mentioned earlier, but because we don’t want to. 

Everyone wants a self-motivated employee. When you decide to work with a freelancer, you know that self-motivation is basically guaranteed.

There are plenty of situations when hiring an employee, whether full-time or part-time, is the right choice for a business. But there are also a lot of situations where a freelancer is the best fit — and there are likely more of the latter than you realize.

If you’re wondering whether a freelancer can support you in developing your content, feel free to reach out to discuss how I can support you.

I’ve found that when most people think of editing, they typically think of fixing spelling and grammar. This is definitely part of editing, but it’s far from the whole story.

In fact, there are a few different types of editing, and each type focuses on improving different aspects of a piece of writing.

In this post, I’ll give a quick rundown on the three primary types of editing. All three types of editing are needed for most pieces of writing, and knowing what they are can help you better polish your work.

First, though, a quick disclaimer: While this post contains what I’ve found to be the most common terms and definitions, there is no universally agreed upon set of editing terminology. Exact definitions may change depending on the industry you’re writing in and the type of content you’re writing. That being said, these terms can give you a good starting point when thinking about editing.

1. Developmental Editing

Developmental editing involves looking at the bigger picture and making sure a piece’s narrative or argument is compelling. This is the type of editing that happens first, and it’s especially important for long-form content.

The term “developmental editing” is sometimes used interchangeably with “structural editing” because it addresses the overall “structure” of a piece — in other words, the order that ideas are presented in.

Developmental editing generally answers these two questions:

• Does the piece make the point it sets out to make?
• Is the piece clear and well-organized throughout?

A developmental editor is not in charge of fixing grammar or spelling. Instead, their job is to add, remove, rearrange, or rewrite entire sections or paragraphs. They may also send notes to the original writer asking for clarifications, additional content, or rewrites.

2. Line editing

Line editing is also sometimes called copyediting, though some editorial houses define these terms slightly differently. Either way, line editing involves looking at content at the sentence level. Line editors polish the language used, tweaking it until they find the exact right tone.

Improving grammar is a big part of line editing, but not the whole part. Line editing also involves correcting for things like:

• Sentence structure
• Clarity
• Tone
• Readability

Essentially, line editors and copyeditors are wordsmiths. They take writing that simply gets the job done and turn it into writing that’s enjoyable to read.

3. Proofreading

Finally, proofreading gets into the nitty-gritty aspects of writing and grammar. Proofreading means giving a piece a close look to make sure there are no errors before it goes to publication.

Proofreaders look at things like:

• Grammar
• Spelling
• Typos
• Layout (if applicable)

Everything else should be buttoned down before it gets to the proofreader. They’re the last line of defense before your content goes live.

Do You Need All Three?

Now that you know what the three main levels of editing are, the next question is, how do you make sure they’re all addressed? Do you really have to hire three editors for each piece of content?

If you’re in content marketing, three separate editors is probably overkill . Typically, only bigger publishing companies have different people in each of these roles. Content marketing teams usually have one editor, often freelance, and the content doesn’t suffer for it — provided they’ve chosen their editor carefully.

However, I do recommend making sure all three levels of editing are addressed. For shorter content, like social copy or short blogs, you can get away with having one editor check for everything. For longer content, like ebooks or white papers, you may want to have a couple editors or find someone on the marketing team who can collaborate with your editor.

If you’re writing a full-length book, I do recommend at least one person for each level of editing, as it’s a lot harder for one person to catch everything when working on a lengthy piece (no matter how good they are). And if you’re writing something that’s going to be printed instead of published digitally, a dedicated proofreader is a good idea no matter how long the content is, since you won’t have the option of editing after the fact.

Editing is often a more complicated and nuanced art than most people realize. I hope this explanation of the three main types of editing has demystified it a little and made it easier for you to bring your content up to the next level. And if you need some editing done — of any type — I’m here to help.

Is your content missing a certain something, but you can’t quite put your finger on what? Does it feel dull and lifeless, or perhaps stilted and forced?

If so, the issue might lie with your content’s tone.

The meaning of “tone” in a writing context is similar to what we mean when we talk about speaking tone: it’s the overall emotion and attitude something is said with. If you’re writing B2C beauty content, you may want a tone that’s playful and casual. If you’re writing B2B medical content, you’ll likely want a tone that’s precise and academic.

Tone is a tricky concept to learn and an even trickier one to master, but there are a few strategies you can fall back on to tweak your tone until your writing is just right. In this post, I’ll give you an overview of some of the things I like to do when adjusting a piece of content’s tone.

Experiment with Word Choice

English has a lot of words. There’s a synonym for nearly everything. While that can be daunting at times, it can also help you change your tone without changing the literal meaning of what you’ve written.

Consider the following examples, and think about how the tones of each differ:

-The digital transformation can launch your business toward new levels of success.

-The digital transformation can catapult your company toward new heights.

-The digital transformation can advance your organization toward new achievements.

Each one says the same thing, but switching out just a few words has given each one a different tone.

• The first one is straightforward and direct. The vivid verb “launch” injects some energy into the sentence, but the rest of the word choice is pretty standard, giving the sentence a respectable, businesslike tone.
• The second sentence is a little snappier. “Catapult” is a more creative verb, and using it in combination with “heights” creates an image of something flying upwards. “Catapult your company” is also an alliteration, which makes the sentence a little playful.
• The third sentence is more reserved. “Advance” is a much more subdued verb; “achievements” is likewise mild. “Organization” is a longer and clunkier but more professional term than “business” or “company.”

If you want your content to be more academic and serious, you can try selecting words that are longer or that have more subdued connotations. If, on the other hand, you want to add more energy to your writing, try using words that are shorter, more creative, and/or more vivid. It’ll likely take some trial and error to land on exactly the right word choice, but there’s no shame in occasionally pulling out a thesaurus.

Use More Active Voice

Now it’s time for a quick grammar lesson. I’m going to go over two approaches to sentence construction that significantly impact tone: active voice and passive voice.

Active voice is the term for when the subject of the sentence performs an action. Passive voice, by contrast, is when an action is done to the subject of the sentence.

The easiest way to understand this is to look at some examples:

Active voice: Greg threw the ball.

Passive voice: The ball was thrown.

Active voice: My cat ate my dinner.

Passive voice: My dinner was eaten by my cat.

Active voice: The teacher assigned essays to the older students and crafts to the younger students.

Passive voice: Essays were assigned to the older students, and crafts were assigned to the younger students.

In all of the active voice examples above, the subject of the sentence—the person or thing the sentence is about—was doing something. In all of the passive voice examples, the subject of the sentence had something done to it.

If you think the tone of your content is lacking energy, one quick and simple fix is to go through the piece and replace instances of passive voice with active voice. This works because active voice, as the name suggests, implies activity and energy. Passive voice tends to make a piece feel slower, duller, or more detached.

No writing rule is unbreakable, and the occasional passive voice can be useful if you want a calmer or more objective tone. It may also be more appropriate for specific types of content, especially in technical or scientific fields.

But if you’re looking for a good writing rule of thumb, one of the best is to use active voice as much as possible.

Think About Your Sentence Structure

Now for the trickiest — but possibly most important — aspect of tone: sentence structure.

English is a funny language in that it’s extremely flexible when it comes to how our sentences can be structured.

To illustrate this, here are a few different ways I could have structured the sentence above:

• When it comes to how our sentences can be structured, English is a funny language in that it’s extremely flexible.
• When it comes to of how our sentences can be structured, English is extremely flexible, which makes it a funny language.
• English is extremely flexible when it comes to how our sentences can be structured; it’s a funny language that way.
• Extremely flexible, English is a funny language when it comes to how our sentences can be structured.
• English if a funny language — when it comes to how our sentences can be structured, it’s extremely flexible.

While some of these sentences read better than others, they’re all grammatically correct. So, how do you choose what sentence structure to use?

The most important thing is to always vary your sentence structure. If you have a couple long sentences in a row, make the next one short; if you have a lot of short sentences, try to add a longer one. When sentence structure is repetitive, the reader gets bored, so variety is key for an engaging tone.

As you go about varying your sentence structure, here are a few other tips to keep in mind:

• Short, simple sentences tend to have more energy.
• Long sentences with multiple parts to them can create a more academic or sophisticated tone.
• Punctuation matters. Commas can make a reader slow down and control how they understand a sentence. Colons and semi-colons sometimes make a piece come across as more academic because those punctuation marks aren’t often used in casual writing. By contrast, dashes can give a piece a more casual, lively tone. (Dashes are also a great grammatical cheat — they let you combine ideas without worrying too much about sentence structure. (See?))

This can be too much to think about while writing your first draft. But when rereading and editing something you’ve written, these tips can help you diagnose why your tone may feel off.

Finally, one of the best ways to perfect your sentence structure is to read your piece aloud. People naturally vary their sentences as they speak, so reading a piece aloud will help you find areas where your content sounds awkward, repetitive, or confusing.

Tone can be a complicated thing to master, but there are a few simple cheats you can use to get your content closer to your vision and better able to connect with your audience. And if you need something more in-depth than simple cheats, remember that you can always hire a professional!

“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”

This quote comes from William Wordsworth’s introduction to his book Lyrical Poems. I first heard it as a starry-eyed undergrad with grandiose ideas about writing, and I thought it was so profound that I wrote it in big letters at the top of my lecture notes. I wrote it again inside the front cover of a notebook I used for creative writing. I’m not a poet, but I envisioned myself as a writer in a very poetic way — someone who was overflowing with powerful feelings that, once transformed into writing, would be able to change the world.

I’ve since reread the things I wrote while overflowing with powerful adolescent emotions. They’re far from poetry, to put it mildly. In fact, they’re pretty awful across the board.

This isn’t just because I was an inexperienced adolescent (though that’s certainly part of it). To this day, everything that I write from feelings alone is usually lackluster. On the other hand, everything that I write with a painstaking, clinical focus — even creative writing — usually results in my strongest work.

What happened to spontaneous overflows? Well, I’ve come to realize that writing (and the Wordsworth quote) is often misrepresented. Writing is not something done on instinct, powered by innate talent or spontaneous emotions. Writing is a concrete skill governed by rules and patterns. And like all skills, anyone can learn it.

This philosophy on has guided my approach to writing and, as a result, my approach to my professional career. Here, I’d like to walk through this approach in more detail to illustrate what I think writing expertise really is.

The “Science” Behind Making Art

Consider how a painter works. A good painter doesn’t just slap paint on a canvas as the mood takes them. Instead, they meticulously choose where each brushstroke goes, how thick it will be, what color it is, etc.

Words are a written piece’s brushstrokes; each one is consciously chosen as deliberately as a brushstroke.

Similarly, just as an artist needs to understand composition principles to create a great picture, a writer needs to understand structure to create a great piece. Whether writing a tech blog or the Great American Novel, we need to be able to identify the individual parts of our work — the audience hook, the statement of the thesis, the satisfying conclusion, etc. And we need to know how each piece fits together.

Using my knowledge of structure, I outlined this article before writing and then tweaked the outline during revision. If I didn’t, this piece would be a meandering rant instead of a cohesive argument.

And just as an artist needs to know the different effects of a thick vs thin brushstroke, a writer needs to know the effects of their words. They need to know what impression is created by long and short sentences, what’s gained or lost by using several different clauses in a sentence, or why they might want to switch out the word “obtain” for “get.” Even the length of paragraphs and the placement of dashes makes a difference, and good writers and editors know this difference.

There’s certainly some level of talent involved — I would not have devoted my life to writing if it didn’t come more easily to me than other things. And there’s a level of passion, too — I genuinely find the topic of this article exciting. (It doesn’t take much to get me excited.) But if I worked off nothing but talent and passion, I would produce drivel. My earliest attempts at writing projects are proof of this.  

It’s my belief that the best writing — the best art of any kind — is a matter of technical skill much more than it’s a matter of talent or artistic vision. But when that technical skill is honed, studied, and practiced, something truly magical happens. The brushstrokes combine to make a beautiful image; the words come together to create a powerful story. All those meticulous details turn into a work of art.

A Skill Like Any Other

Having worked as a writer and editor for a several years, I can guarantee that almost no piece of good writing is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Not for the writer, anyway.

In fact, my undergraduate lecturer took that Wordsworth quote completely out of context. After that line, Wordsworth had gone on to say, “and though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced … but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.” In other words, poetry evokes and represents powerful feelings, but it’s written by people who think carefully about those feelings before putting them down.

I believe that writing is a skill like any other, no more and no less. It’s a skill that you can learn, practice, and eventually master, but it does require practice — no one can spontaneously write well, no matter how passionate or knowledgeable they are.  

I’ll talk more in future blogs about exactly how I study and practice writing, and about what the building blocks of a strong piece of written content are. And if you don’t have the time to devote to learning a this skill, or even if you just need a little support along the way, you can always hire someone to help out.