Health Writer's Month: Writing Style

Wego Health:
 Health Activist Writer's Month Challenge

Today's challenge topic is:

Writing with Style. What’s your writing style? Do words just flow from your mind to your fingertips? Do you like handwriting first? Do you plan your posts? Title first or last? Where do you write best?




After reading the questions, I begin to suspect I have no style!

I used to be a journalist. That meant I gathered the information, then sat down and wrote the story as fast as humanly possible, because there was a deadline coming and I needed to get enough stories written.

That's kind of what I do. Often the information in a blog is from my own life, so gathering information, is simply considering what I want to write about while drinking my morning coffee.  Other times, I really do research - and there will be references or links to the book on Amazon somewhere so you know what my sources were.

Either way, once I have my information, I just write. I try not to fall back into the habit of active voice sentence construction and inverted-pyramid format, (journalists' writing style), but to vary what I write a bit. I don't want you constantly feeling like you're reading the newspaper. Mostly, however, I still just work on autopilot. I know what information I want to convey, and I write it. It's a matter of long habit.

Lupus

I usually do the title first - again it's an old habit. In journalism, we always put something at the top of the page to identify the story. (Not the headline that comes later. The "slug" is just a word or two - if this were a newspaper story, it might have "style" written on it as a slug.)

Where do I write? That has changed a lot!  I do still write at my desk at times. When I'm not feeling well, I lie in bed or on the couch to write. (That's something I couldn't have done back in the far reaches of history when I was a journalist - all I had was desktop computers.)