Sunday, November 15, 2009

3 Proven Strategies To Improve Your Food Writing


Write Like A Pro With These Proven Strategies

One of the elements that I'm constantly trying to improve on is the writing on my blog. I'm a visual person by nature, so writing never really came naturally to me. Through a little bit of hard work and research however, I've found that improving the quality of my writing is not as hard as I originally imagined.

A couple of weeks ago I posted about using vivid adjectives to improve your food writing and today I want to elaborate on that topic but also share a bit more information found through my research. These three strategies are easy to implement and will immediately add life to your writing.


Strategy #1 - Create A Dominant Mood

Creating a dominant mood adds focus and direction to your blog posts. I think of this strategy as adding one dominant "topic" to the post and using descriptive writing to convey the atmosphere and mood of that "topic". A dominant mood can be a memory of a recipe, the experience of making the recipe, the event of eating the results, etc. etc.

The key to this strategy is in using the classic rule: Don't tell me, SHOW me. In other words, don't tell me your pound cake turned out to be a disaster, SHOW me what that experience looked like! For information on this classic descriptive writing rule check out this helpful post.

Strategy #2 - Use Sensory Details For Vivid Descriptions

Sensory descriptions utilize all five senses to describe the experience. These details help to give a complete picture of your dominant mood and really places the reader inside of the experience you are describing. When writing your post, make sure that sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste are all accounted for. This strategy really helped me when writing my posts.

Strategy #3 - Vary Sentence Structure To Retain Interest

When writing descriptively it's easy to fall into a pattern of sentence structures. We tend to want to recreate the same subject-verb pattern. This of course, creates monotony and can lead to an overwhelming reading experience for your readers.

To avoid this, break up the length and pattern of your sentences. Punctuate the post with short, punchy descriptions followed by longer prose. Adding descriptive detail breaks will help you not fall into a sentence rut.

Hopefully these three strategies will help you as much as they helped me. Do any of you have any other food writing tips? I'd love to hear about them in the comments.

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