Getting Creative With Organizing Principles for Blogs

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“A well-chosen organizing principle can serve as a strong differentiator for your story, helping to set it apart from the competition,“ suggests Paula Munier in her book the Writer’s Guide to Beginnings. 

Organizing principles run from beginning to end throughout the story, and can:
  • help add layers of meaning
  • enhance the imagery
  • deepen the story’s themes
If you’re writing from the first-person point of view of the heroine, for example, you should stick to that point of view for the entire story, Munier suggests.  But, using the novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple as an example, Munier shows how a resourceful author uses devices to being other voices into the story. Semple incorporates emails and letters received by Bernadette, school notes, signs, police reports, even report cards.  That way, even though the entire novel is in first person, the reader can enjoy other points of view and styles of writing.

In corporate blogging, I stress first person business blog writing because of its one enormous advantage – it shows the people behind the posts, revealing the personality of the business owner, practitioner, or the team standing ready to serve customers. In terms of getting creative, though, curating materials from different sources allows the content to keep its organizing principle intact while offering a broader range of information and adding interest as well.

Different blog posts, of course, serve different purposes. Second person (“you”, “your”) is a good fit for how-to blog posts, while third person (“he”, “she”, “they”) may be a choice for news items.

“The voice of a writer is usually easier to hear in first person,” says William Cane in Write Like the Masters. Why? “Third person narratives so often mimic the ‘beige voice’ of an objective reporter,” Cane explains, whereas “with first person, it’s usually easier to be intimate, unique, and quirky.”

Each blog (not just each blog post) needs an organizing principle, which should be based on a deep understanding of the target audience. Still, by incorporating outside sources, “Other People’s Wisdom”, and even quoting from documents, letters, comments, etc., blog content writers can get creative around that principle.

To stay personal, we Indianapolis blog writers need to show readers we’re talking very specifically to them. At the same time, blogging for business will be at its best when it’s colorful, filled with the company’s special brand of energy and passion, all built around that all-important organizing principle.  
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Blogging the Lure and What They Say

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At Say It For You, I’m always on the lookout for different “templates” for presenting information about any business or professional practice. The “nucleus” around which business blog posts are formed is their topic (issues, products, services and advice related to their field). Although the general topic remains the same over time, there is endless variety that can be used to make each blog post special, with one way being the use of different templates.

Browsing through a magazine called Where to Retire, I found an interesting template in a long article naming the 50 Best Master-Planned Communities in the United States. For each community, the report consisted of two longer sections: the Lure (special features of that community) and “What Residents Say” (testimonials), followed by facts and statistics (the name of the developer, the price, the monthly homeowner fee, and whether the community is age-restricted).

Whenever you have several pieces of information to impart, consider different “templates” that can unify them under one umbrella. The “template” is the glue that ties the different pieces of information together and makes the information more usable for readers.

Collating and curating are two ways blog content writers deliver value to readers:

In collating, we gather content from our own former blog posts, newsletters, or even emails, adding material from other people’s blogs and articles, and from magazine content or books. We then organize that material into categories, summarizing the main ideas we think our readers will find useful. The Where to Retire article is a perfect example of collation.

Curating goes one important step further, progressing from information-dispensing to offering the business owner’s (or the professional’s, or the organizational executive’s) unique perspective on issues related to the search topic. When curation is really successful, two things happen:

  1. Readers relate to the “curator” – you, the author of the blog post – as an involved person who is personally engaged with the subject.
  2. Readers realize there’s something here that’s important and useful for them.

Blogging “the lure” is a perfect example of collation combined with testimonials!

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