What Fiction and Nonfiction Writers Can Learn From Each Other

As a kid, I loved writing fiction—long, rambling, imaginative stories that didn’t have much structure. So when I took freshman comp in college, I got a rude awakening. An essay? With a beginning, middle, and end? Where I had to stick to the facts? I was in over my head.

4 Signs You May (Desperately) Need a Content Manager

It happens to the best, most well-intentioned of us.

You start a blog for your website to help boost your marketing goals, and you begin writing often. But writing on the daily (or even on the weekly) can become quite taxing when you’re also running your own business, especially if your blog is helping you find more of that business.

You then decide to bring some writers onto your team. With the (wo)manpower to fuel dozens of articles a month, without necessarily relying on your own personal time investment, you’re working your way toward becoming a content-producing boss and killin’ your marketing strategy.

Until you realize there’s a big issue you need to solve: How do you find a consistent, cohesive blog voice when you have a team of writers?

What Other People’s Blog Posts Can Teach You About Structure

I expect you already know the basic structure of a blog post: introduction, main body, and conclusion.

With these three key elements in place, you’ve got the bare bones of a well-structured piece, whether it’s a short news article, an in-depth essay, or a breezy “top tips” post.

Sometimes, though, you want to do something a little different on your blog. Perhaps you’ve written a lot of “10 Ways to …” posts recently and you’d like to mix things up a bit.

A great way to deepen your understanding of structure—and to write posts that your readers will love—is to study a blog post that you enjoyed reading. Perhaps it’s a post that helped you think in a new way about something, or even a post you re-read, again and again.

History of the English Language, Part I: The Rise of English

Today, you can go almost anywhere in the world, and you’ll find someone who can communicate with you in English. Some speak it well, and some speak it with difficulty, but almost everyone knows at least a few words.

With that in mind, it occurred to me recently that I would like to know a little more about how the English language got its start, how it developed, what influenced it, and how it rose to such a position of prominence in the world.

In this piece, we’ll take a brief look at the origin of English and its evolution from the fifth century to the early 21st century and look at what influenced English along the way, including the Industrial Revolution, colonialism, and the rise of the United States, all leading to English being established as a world language.