AaronTurpen.com

First off, I would like to welcome you to this blog, where I’ll be talking about writing, from both a professional and an amateur prospective.  I often have clients, friends, or people who run into me on the Web ask me about the aspects of writing for the Internet and how different types and styles of writing are used for content and promotion.

One of the things that most people seem to misunderstand are the differences that exist between the several styles of writing as they relate to a venue.  So I thought I would cover that today.

First and foremost, writing is rarely easy to do.  While some have an innate talent for words and phrases, most have to work very hard to hone this skill into something that is above and beyond the average.  Like most professionals, writers often specialize in one type of writing or one style or venue.  Let me explain.

Venues

There are many venues for writers to aim towards when writing and this, above all else, nearly always decides the final style and type of writing.  If, for instance, the article you’re writing will appear in a printed magazine of a generally mainstream type, like say Vanity Fair or Time Magazine, then your writing will be very different than if you’re writing for a personal blog.

In general, printed venues are, in a traditional sense, looking for material that is written on an 8th grade academic level.  This includes using sentences and phrases that can be understood by most people reading without requiring a dictionary, but without sounding too dumbed-down.  Sentences tend to be longer and more complex, but most of the vocabulary will be relatively colloquial.

News-oriented venues will instead prefer what’s called the Associated Press Style (APS), which is news reporting with no first person and no colloquial terminology.  Just straight forward, choppy sentences with a clear beginning, middle, and end for the story being told.  Facts are situated so that the most important (and eye-catching) are at the beginning, tapering down towards the extraneous loose ends before ending with a summary of the entire story.

On the Internet, however, there is a revolution taking place and a more colloquial, first-person (or at least “common man”) approach is being taken to both news reporting and commentary.  I specialize in writing for online publication and so I use a very “down home” style of writing.  This includes a lot of contractions (“can’t” instead of “cannot”) with writing that reads as if someone were speaking rather than, well, stiffly writing.

Before any writer can be successful, he or she must first understand the venue being written for.  Many print writers are having a hard time adjusting to writing online outside of print publisher’s websites, which still expect their online fare to match their paper publication.  Academic institutions are still teaching with an eye towards print publications, but that is slowly changing.

Types of Writing

There are a lot of writing styles and they’re used for many different things.  Writing isn’t just novels, journalism, or editorial and philosophy.  Writing also includes copy writing, tagline or sloganeering, and more.  There are many types of writing and few writers are good at more than one or two.

For instance, I write mostly news reporting and editorials as well as creatives for website copy and technical information.  I am not, however, particularly skilled at sales copy and marketing work (also called “copy writing”).  This requires a specific skillset that understands more than just basic marketing techniques, going into psychology and different strategies for using words and phrases to create sales pull from a website, billboard, leaflet, etc.

Writing fiction, similarly, is very different from writing non-fiction.  Most people can be very good at one, but not particularly good at the other.  Most fiction writers, for example, are not generally good at objective news reporting or sales and marketing copy.  Most non-fiction writers are, by the same token, not generally good at fiction.  Some are good at both, but find that one or the other requires much more work and effort on their part to make it shine.

Another style of writing that is often overlooked is technical writing, which is very different from the others already mentioned.  When I began writing, in fact, I began as a technical writer.  The specific skillset required, more often than not, is the ability to understand complicated technology and turn that into something that the average person can understand by reading your descriptions.  One of my first paid writing jobs, back in 2000, was to write the user’s manual for an online application, explaining how the technical aspects of the website app worked so that everyday users with little computer knowledge could understand it.

As you can see, there are many types of writing and I’ve only given a basic overview of them here.

Over time, I will discuss different aspects of writing.  I’ll also talk about how I’ve found writing work, how to market your own work, and other issues surrounding the profession of writing.  If you have any questions for me or have suggestions for a future article you’d like to see, please feel free to leave comments or send an email through my Contact page.

Related posts:

1. The Associated Press Style