Plan To Write, Write To A Plan

I planned to write a note about improving stories, and then I found a great plan post from Copyblogger, Pamela Wilson.

Pamela’s story, “A Simple Plan for Writing One Powerful Piece of Online Content per Week” covers some of the things I wanted to say, but also goes into much more, about structuring the production of your work.

The key things I wanted to say are about layout and structure, that help readers to handle your longer stories. I’ve talked about this before, in newsletters, so I thought maybe it was better to blog it this time.

Help Your Reader Feel At Ease

When a reader comes to your story, attracted by the headline, the first thing you need to do is to validate that they will get what they expected they would get, when they saw the headline.

There is one more thing that is just as important to do, possibly even more important than getting “the lead” right. That thing is visual structure.

If a headline link takes you to a story that has no visual structure, no paragraph breaks, no subheadings, no photos or graphics, that huge chunk of text can make you feel as though this will be too hard to handle. That is the reason NewsBlaze editors reformat many of the incoming stories.

Written in a conversational style, Pamela’s story isn’t intimidating at all, because of the whitespace and the subheading breaks, that make you immediately feel at ease. At least, it did for me. Our news stories are rarely in the conversational style, but the same structure and layout works for almost any type of story.

Check out Pamela’s story, “A Simple Plan for Writing One Powerful Piece of Online Content per Week”, and let me know what you think about her structure and her method of preparing for the story. Many of the comments below her post are informative too.