Do you want to be more persuasive, inspiring and influential? Would you give or welcome feedback? Then read on...
Why Should You Learn to Write Better?
The more value the readers gets from the article, the more likely they are to upvote. You want upvotes, don't you? The way an article is written has a huge effect on the perception. Just have a look at this and compare it to this to get an example. The 80/20 rule often applies here. You have done 80% of the work but without proper structuring you get only 20% of your possible earnings. With a little tweaking you can increase the value of your content by 80%, which results in more people actually reading your article and a greater percentage of them appreciating it.
If you can learn to write articles that capture the reader, your rewards will be multiplied. With the help of others and some practice it will become natural and habitual, and you will earn more without any extra effort.
I believe it will be beneficial to the Steem platform and to all of humanity if we learn to write better. The ones who aquire the ability will be the ones to reap the greatest benefit. Will you be one of them?
A Mutual Writing Aid Group
Everyone interested in writing better articles, helping others write better and in getting a share in the success of others can join this group. This group is informal, and is actually only a description of how to participate. We want to learn and grow together, and share the benefits. Any formal structure can evolve naturally and practices will be adjusted to better suit the purposes, once we have received some experience.
I outline no rules of good writing here; they are better laid out in a separate post. This post is about the mutual help group itself. Best practices will emerge naturally and at some point we might co-author an article on them. Meanwhile you can read this article by @cryptogee about how to write good articles.
How the Scheme Works
- Write an article under a suitable category. Write it as well as you can. Submit it.
- Make a separate post under the writing category, where you link to your article and ask for feedback. Also link to this article for an explanation. The reason for a separate post for the feedback is to keep it from cluttering and thus lowering the quality of the article in question. Here is an example.
- Decide what percentage of the earnings of your article you promise to share with the contributors. State it. This will incentivize lots of people to give feedback, which is valuable to you but costs nearly nothing to give.
- Take the feedback and implement it if possible. Don't worry if it takes a lot of time, because you will accumulate the know-how and next time it will be more automatic
- Give others constructive feedback and get a share of their earnings
- Make sure to check the writing category every now and then for new requests
- Once you receive your reward, make sure you pay everyone who has contributed. This will have to be done manually until someone comes up with some automated solution.
Because steem has no mechanism to create a group, this will be an informal one. Anyone can participate. Until a possibility to filter categories is provided, all users will see the requests for feedback, so remember to provide a link to this article.
How to Provide Good Feedback
- Read the article to see if you understand what the writer is trying to communicate. Upon any problems think how you could express the same thought in some better way
- Make note of any grammatical errors
- Look at how the article is constructed. Is there a logical thread or is it unclear?
- See if you can identify the core message of the article
- When giving feedback, write the different points in a numbered list. This will make it easy to address the observations in replies.
- Be polite. Remember that receiving feedback might be hard.
So Why Not Participate Now?
- Check out the #writing category or #writingfeedback tag for any requests for feedback. Give feedback
- Ask for feedback on your articles with a second post - to keep the article itself uncluttered. Make sure to include the #writingfeedback tag in your request.