A frequent question in the blog writing sessions is – how can I make my writing more conversational? Relax is my first piece of advice. Don’t worry too much about the grammar and let your personality shine through. Henneke Duistermaat suggests some helpful tips to make your writing sound more conversational: Don’t write for everybody – think about…Continue Reading Want to make your posts more conversational? Read this…
The focus of this month’s writing group was creating blog titles to grab the attention of readers. We looked at advice from Corey Wainwright’s blog post on the subject, which outlined the following key points: Start with a working title – note down a rough title to give you a focus when you start writing a…Continue Reading How to hook readers in with catchy blog titles
October’s Writing Group was our busiest yet, with participants from different City departments and also representatives from the Students’ Union. We continued our focus on editing. This time, using advice from Stephen King, we waged war on the “Atrocity of Adverbs” (Popova, 2013). We read his advice on tightening your writing by avoiding adverbs. In…Continue Reading “Fear is at the root of most bad writing.” Stephen King
This summer the LEaD writing group activities focused on editing. This post outlines the activities so you too can use them to pep up your prose. 1. Hiding the ‘I’ in fiction and non-fiction Blog writing can be a reflective form of writing. As a result, we may use ‘I’ a lot. However, this does…Continue Reading Editing – pep up your prose
Last week saw the monthly meeting of the LEaD Writing Group. This is a brief account of the proceedings and an invitation to join us. As usual, we started with a quick writing activity to introduce an exercise that participants can use to develop their own or their students’ writing skills. This month’s exercise was called…Continue Reading LEaD Writing Group – “I lay awake, unable to sleep, and all because…”
Keep it snappy! It’s an obvious piece of advice, but one we often ignore. In this month’s LEaD Writing Group we spent most of the time writing. However, we did take a quick break to look at some tips about effective blogging. You can read the advice here: 18 Must-use writing strategies + examples My favourite tip…Continue Reading Keep it snappy! Top blog writing tips
This month’s theme for the LEaD Writing Group was creativity. We started by using an activity suggested by Heather Leach in The Road to Somewhere: A Creative Writing Companion. Stretch the imaginative muscle (Leach, 2014). Choose any object that you have around you. In our case, I gave the participants a book. Make a list…Continue Reading LEaD Writing Group – Developing your creativity
The LEaD Writing Group has been running for just over 6 months now. The group was set up to encourage more staff to contribute to the Learning at City blog and to provide a time and space for people to do some writing. The sessions aim to provide activities to help staff to develop their writing…Continue Reading LEaD Writing Group – Review