Writing On The Web - Part 1

This is the first post in a series of posts to this blog I will call "Writing On The Web." The series will include article writing tips from Bytepowered Articles and guest writers chosen by yours truly. If you have submitted articles to any of Bytepowered Articles writing categories, your article might show up here.

The intent of this series of posts, "Writing On The Web," is to emphasize the importance of good writing skills to all authors or authors to be.


Writing on the Web is booming because publishers understand that fresh and creative content is vital for Search Engine ranking. Webmasters, Ezine Authors and Bloggers are cranking out articles, blog posts and E-books by the thousands. The lure of page ranking and viral marketing has brought an onslaught of new authors and with new authors comes a boom in poor writing.

As the owner and webmaster of the free articles directory Bytepowered Articles, I see more writing mistakes than most Web surfers. Honestly, the writing skill of some supposed experts that submit articles to Bytepowered Articles is appalling.

When I am reviewing articles for acceptance into my directory, I have the following options .

• Accept the article as it is. (Posted to the directory immediately.)
• Edit the article. (Automatically accepted after edit.)
  
• Reject the article. (Puts the article on hold for the author to edit.)
  
• Delete (We all know what that means.)

How I use these options.
Bytepowered Articles is a niche articles directory which simply means that articles are accepted to a limited number of categories. All articles are read, edited and accepted manually to maintain excellence in quality. In this case, articles that are relevant to Computers, the Internet and Communications. You can view accepted categories at the bottom of the Bytepowered Articles index page.

Accept:
Well written and relevant articles are always posted immediately.

Edit:
If an article has very minor errors such as a common misspelling or is obviously missing a line break, I will manually make the correction and the article will be posted.

Reject:
If an article is well written but has poor spelling, too many personal hyperlinks in the body or is not well formatted, I may choose to Reject the article. Rejecting the article puts the article on hold and sends an email to the author describing the reason for rejection and gives the author the opportunity to correct the mistakes. After the author makes corrections the article is automatically resubmitted for review.

Delete:
What would you guess is the most common reason for deleting and article?
Spelling?
Too many hyperlinks?
Bad formatting?
Poor grammar?

My number one reason would fall under poor grammar. Articles are most often deleted because of bad sentence structure. The kind of sentence structure that leaves you wondering how the author could possibly fill out a job application or resume.

After reading the first paragraph of an article if I still have no idea what the article is about--I just delete it. The sad truth is that happens more often than you might think. At least two of every fifty articles reviewed read like the author just took some bad LSD. It begins with gibberish and ends with babbling. Words are in the wrong order or the author uses words that change intended meaning. This indicates that the author does not fully understand the meaning of the words being used. Sometimes using two or three redundant adverbs or prepositions where none is needed just causes further confusion.

I will stop ranting now and describe this in more detail later in this series of posts.

Next, "The Five C's of Quality Writing," By: Scott White