" Be yourself. Above all, let who you are, what you are, what you believe, shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish.”




John Jakes







Reading works of prominent writers we think that writing comes to them as if by magic touch. The right words just jump down onto paper from their heads, elegant sentences are formed instantly by themselves. All the writer has to do is just to write it all down. We regard writing as some innate gift given to the few. That is why most of us are too critical and unfair to ourselves when we judge our own writing. In fact, writing like any skill can be acquired if you are ready to work hard, be persistent and patient. BestEssayTips.com is here to show you how to write better.



Basically we have designed our site for college students, but this information will be helpful for all people seeking advice on writing. Here you can find many useful tips on writing that will help you avoid most common pitfalls and refine your writing style. Our site provides you with a comprehensive guide to writing different types of essays and makes difficult things easy for you.



Our essay guide explains all the intricacies and details of essay writing process from drawing up plans to editing your final draft. Whether you don’t know how to start writing the essay or you want to find out how you should complete it BestEssayTips.com has advice on every issue concerning essay writing process.



Our guide will become your reliable companion and consultant in composing various kinds of essays. You will learn how to present your thoughts and ideas on the paper, how to sound authoritative and convincing, in brief how to become a better writer. We have pursued one more goal building up this site – we want you to like writing and view it as a pleasant and thought-stimulating activity.







Writing is like a journey: you start with a blank sheet of paper and what appears on it in the end of the trip depends only on you. You should go through every stage of essay writing process described in this guide to write the essay that:



is focused;


is logical;


is clear;


is well-structured;


is deeply–argumentative;


grabs the reader’s interest from the first lines;


does not pad;


provides illustrative evidence;


gives credits to sources.

This journey may take a long time and be challenging at times, but do not step back. Our guide will be a constant beacon lightening your path as you proceed.

1. Choose the Right Blog Software (or Custom Build)


 The right blog CMS makes a big difference. If you want to set yourself apart, I recommend creating a custom blog solution - one that can be completely customized to your users. In most cases, WordPress, Blogger, MovableType or Typepad will suffice, but building from scratch allows you to be very creative with functionality and formatting. The best CMS is something that's easy for the writer(s) to use and brings together the features that allow the blog to flourish. Think about how you want comments, archiving, sub-pages, categorization, multiple feeds and user accounts to operate in order to narrow down your choices. OpenSourceCMS is a very good tool to help you select a software if you go that route.

2.Host Your Blog Directly on Your Domain


Hosting your blog on a different domain from your primary site is one of the worst mistakes you can make. A blog on your domain can attract links, attention, publicity, trust and search rankings - by keeping the blog on a separate domain, you shoot yourself in the foot. From worst to best, your options are - Hosted (on a solution like Blogspot or Wordpress), on a unique domain (at least you can 301 it in the future), on a subdomain (these can be treated as unique from the primary domain by the engines) and as a sub-section of the primary domain (in a subfolder or page - this is the best solution).

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3.Write Title Tags with Two Audiences in Mind

First and foremost, you're writing a title tag for the people who will visit your site or have a subscription to your feed. Title tags that are short, snappy, on-topic and catchy are imperative. You also want to think about search engines when you title your posts, since the engines can help to drive traffic to your blog. A great way to do this is to write the post and the title first, then run a few searches at Overture, WordTracker & KeywordDiscovery to see if there is a phrasing or ordering that can better help you to target "searched for" terms.

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4.Participate at Related Forums & Blogs

Whatever industry or niche you're in, there are bloggers, forums and an online community that's already active. Depending on the specificity of your focus, you may need to think one or two levels broader than your own content to find a large community, but with the size of the participatory web today, even the highly specialized content areas receive attention. A great way to find out who these people are is to use Technorati to conduct searches, then sort by number of links (authority). Del.icio.us tags are also very useful in this process, as are straight searches at the engines (Ask.com's blog search in particular is of very good quality).

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5.Tag Your Content

Technorati is the first place that you should be tagging posts. I actually recommend having the tags right on your page, pointing to the Technorati searches that you're targeting. There are other good places to ping - del.icio.us and Flickr being the two most obvious (the only other one is Blogmarks, which is much smaller). Tagging content can also be valuable to help give you a "bump" towards getting traffic from big sites like Reddit, Digg & StumbleUpon (which requires that you download the toolbar, but trust me - it's worth it). You DO NOT want to submit every post to these sites, but that one out of twenty (see tactic #18) is worth your while.

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6.Launch Without Comments (and Add Them Later)

There's something sad about a blog with 0 comments on every post. It feels dead, empty and unpopular. Luckily, there's an easy solution - don't offer the ability to post comments on the blog and no one will know that you only get 20 uniques a day. Once you're upwards of 100 RSS subscribers and/or 750 unique visitors per day, you can open up the comments and see light activity. Comments are often how tech-savvy new visitors judge the popularity of a site (and thus, its worth), so play to your strengths and keep your obscurity private.

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7.Don't Jump on the Bandwagon

Some memes are worthy of being talked about by every blogger in the space, but most aren't. Just because there's huge news in your industry or niche DOES NOT mean you need to be covering it, or even mentioning it (though it can be valuable to link to it as an aside, just to integrate a shared experience into your unique content). Many of the best blogs online DO talk about the big trends - this is because they're already popular, established and are counted on to be a source of news for the community. If you're launching a new blog, you need to show people in your space that you can offer something unique, different and valuable - not just the same story from your point of view. This is less important in spaces where there are very few bloggers and little online coverage and much more in spaces that are overwhelmed with blogs (like search, or anything else tech-related).

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8.Link Intelligently

When you link out in your blog posts, use convention where applicable and creativity when warranted, but be aware of how the links you serve are part of the content you provide. Not every issue you discuss or site you mention needs a link, but there's a fine line between overlinking and underlinking. The best advice I can give is to think of the post from the standpoint of a relatively uninformed reader. If you mention Wikipedia, everyone is familiar and no link is required. If you mention a specific page at Wikipedia, a link is necessary and important. Also, be aware that quoting other bloggers or online sources (or even discussing their ideas) without linking to them is considered bad etiquette and can earn you scorn that could cost you links from those sources in the future. It's almost always better to be over-generous with links than under-generous. And link condoms? Only use them when you're linking to something you find truly distasteful or have serious apprehension about.

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9.Invite Guest Bloggers

Asking a well known personality in your niche to contribute a short blog on their subject of expertise is a great way to grow the value and reach of your blog. You not only flatter the person by acknowledging their celebrity, you nearly guarantee yourself a link or at least an association with a brand that can earn you readers. Just be sure that you really are getting a quality post from someone that's as close to universally popular and admired as possible (unless you want to start playing the drama linkbait game, which I personally abhor). If you're already somewhat popular, it can often be valuable to look outside your space and bring in guest authors who have a very unique angle or subject matter to help spice up your focus. One note about guest bloggers - make sure they agree to have their work edited by you before it's posted. A disagreement on this subject after the fact can have negative ramifications.

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                                            Mistakes Made When Writing

It’s time once again to review those nasty errors that damage our credibility when we write. Not normally a fun task, but absolutely necessary. I promise to keep you amused to diminish the pain (or at least I’ll give it a shot).




As with the last time we explored grammatical errors, I feel compelled to mention that copywriting and blogging should be conversational and engaging, and breaking formal grammatical and spelling conventions can often be a good thing. Every time I see a comment complaining about something like, oh, I don’t know… the improper use of an ellipsis or one-sentence paragraphs, I shake my head with sadness.



They just don’t get it.



Outside of specific professional or academic contexts, writing with a personal style that makes it easier on the reader is more important than pleasing Strunk and White. That said, I also believe you have to know the rules in order to break them. Plus, there are some errors that you’ll never convince anyone that you did intentionally in the name of style (outside of a joke), and even then some people will still assume you’re dumb.



So, let’s take a look at some more of those types of glaring errors that you never want to make. Thanks to reader suggestions and the aforementioned Messrs. Strunk and White, here are seven more common mistakes that can diminish the shine and credibility of your writing.



1. Loose vs. Lose

This one drives a lot of people crazy, including me. In fact, it’s so prevalent among bloggers that I once feared I was missing something, and somehow “loose” was a proper substitute for “lose” in some other English-speaking countries. Here’s a hint: it’s not.



If your pants are too loose, you might lose your pants.



2. Me, Myself, and I

One of the most common causes of grammatical pain is the choice between “me” and “I.” Too often people use “I” when they should use “me,” because since “I” sounds stilted and proper, it must be right, right? Nope.



The easy way to get this one right is to simply remove the other person from the sentence and then do what sounds correct. You would never say “Give I a call,” so you also wouldn’t say “Give Chris and I a call.” Don’t be afraid of me.



And whatever you do, don’t punt and say “myself” because you’re not sure whether “me” or “I” is the correct choice. “Myself” is only proper in two contexts, both of which are demonstrated below.



Many consider Chris a punk, but I myself tolerate him. Which brings me to ask myself, why?



3. Different than vs. Different from

This one slips under the radar a lot, and I’ll bet I’ve screwed it up countless times. It boils down to the fact that things are logically different from one another, and using the word “than” after different is a grammatical blunder.



This vase is different from the one I have, but I think mine is better than this one.



4. Improper Use of the Apostrophe

Basically, you use an apostrophe in two cases:



For contractions (don’t for do not)

To show possession (Frank’s blog means the blog belongs to Frank)

If still in doubt, leave the apostrophe out. It causes more reader confusion to insert an apostrophe where it doesn’t belong than it does to omit one. Plus, you can always plead the typo defense if you leave an apostrophe out, but you look unavoidably dumb when you stick one where it doesn’t belong.



5. Parallelism

Back when I talked about bullet points, one of the tips involved keeping each bullet item in parallel by beginning with the same part of speech. For example, each item might similarly begin with a verb like so:



deliver…

prompt…

cause…

drive…

When writing a list of items in paragraph form, this is even more crucial, and failing to stay in parallel can result in confusion for readers and scorn from English majors. Check out this non-parallel list in a sentence:




Over the weekend, Kevin bought a new MacBook Pro online, two software programs, and arranged for free shipping.



Do you see the problem? If not, break the list into bullet points and it becomes clear:



Over the weekend, Kevin:



Bought a new MacBook Pro online

Two software programs

Arranged for free shipping

Stick the word “ordered” in front of “two software programs” and you’re in parallel. Your readers will subconsciously thank you, and the Grammar Nazis won’t slam you.



6. i.e. vs. e.g.

Ah, Latin… you’ve just gotta love it. As antiquated as they might seem, these two little Latin abbreviations are pretty handy in modern writing, but only if you use them correctly.



The Latin phrase id est means “that is,” so i.e. is a way of saying “in other words.” It’s designed to make something clearer by providing a definition or saying it in a more common way.



Copyblogger has jumped the shark, i.e., gone downhill in quality, because Brian has broken most of his New Year’s resolutions.



The Latin phrase exempli gratia means “for example”, so e.g. is used before giving specific examples that support your assertion.



Copyblogger has jumped the shark because Brian has broken most of his New Year’s resolutions, e.g., promising not to say “Web 2.0,” “linkbait,” or “jumped the shark” on the blog in 2007.



7. Could of, Would of, Should of

Please don’t do this:



I should of gone to the baseball game, and I could of, if Billy would of done his job.



This is correct:



I should have gone to the baseball game, and could have, if Billy had done his job.



Why do people make this mistake?



They could’ve, should’ve, would’ve been correct, except that the ending of those contractions is slurred when spoken. This creates something similar to a homophone, i.e., a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning, e.g., of, which results in the common grammatical mistake of substituting of for have.



Ain’t this been fun?



For more tips on avoiding grammatical mistakes, check out Five Grammatical Errors That Make You Look Dumb.

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