One Powerful Way to Make Your Online Writing Jump

Thousands of messages attack your potential readers every day. With every email, every search, every billboard – your target audience is assaulted. People are tired of everyone screaming at them for 30 seconds of attention. How can you rise above the noise and reach your audience? Speak softly and connect heart to heart.

My wise mentor once told me if I only wanted to reach someone’s head, then write from my head. However, if I wanted to touch a life – speak to the heart. To speak to the heart, you have to write from the heart. Tell your story. Here is my short story to begin 2012.

I have never enjoyed a two-week break from work more than I have this year. I left my office on December 16th and will return next week. I usually work myself to exhaustion on my time off with home projects, left-over work, or freelance work. I always  have another writing project for my Masters degree to finish, but this year – I just did nothing. This so against my strong work ethic that I struggled with guilt, but I needed the rest from everything work, academic, or home related. Almost time to go back to work and I feel – ready. My thoughts are clear and I see what I was missing.

Part of my need for rest is that this spring semester at KSU is going to be a busy one. I am working on my last phase of my Masters thesis (my practicum capstone). In addition to writing about what I am doing, I have to lead three workshops as part of my capstone. It is stressful and exhilating at the time. In addition to my normal workload, I do freelance work as a marketer/consultant.  I tend to go full-steam ahead into any project and that leads to a heavy workload. The thing that suffers is my own writing.

I was reading about online writing and digital rhetoric – the subject of my research, writing, and workshops this spring and it hit me. I am not even practicing what I am writing about – that is writing in the digital environment. How can I speak to this with authority unless I am working at it everyday? I had abandoned this blog. So, I decided to start 2012 doing what I spend so much time thinking and talking about – how to write better online. I want to share what I have been learning about using words that jump out of the computer screen and into my reader’s heart. One of the most powerful ways to do this is to tell a story. The most authentic story is your own. This blog is my story.