Dreams make the soul, without the soul, the body is nothing. So, live your dreams
Check out MY new BLOG!!
Blog Writers Cannot Build Buildings
Sept 09th, 2008
by Marsha Maung
Talking about writing, did you know that there are many kinds of freelance writing jobs in this world? Not only are we talking about writing for blogs, ghost writing for books, web writing, business writing, copy writing, technical writing…blah blah blah. In my personal opinion, all these are just terms. Termd that helps define what type of stuff the writer is well-versed in. But does this mean that a technical writer is incapable of producing top-notch stuff for a….say, an advertisement….something that a copy writer does?
I don’t know, actually. Being a freelance writer and blog writer, I’ve always prided myself as being a person who can adopt a versatile writing style that suited the genre. My experience in doing that is this….it’s like climbing a tree with an anchor tied to your legs and someone’s holding a torch to your rear end as you’re doing it. A struggle doesn’t even begin to describe the feeling. A feeling akin to peeling off your own skin one painful layer by one painful layer.
From experience, I can tell you one thing for sure….and it’s that once a freelance writer, be it a content writer, a blog content writer, a personal autobiography writer, a copywriter, once the writer gets used to the habit of writing in one style, it’s hard to snap out of that style and adopt another style.
For instance, I’ve been blogging professionally for some time…this means that I ghost blog for people. Some of these people don’t like the fact that ‘they don’t like people to know that they didn’t write the blog posts themselves’ so I am just going to zip up about that one. And I remember one time, a client approached me and asked me, “So! You’re a freelance writer. You can write technical stuff, right? I’ll be giving you all the materials and such, so, it should be a breeze”.
I thought it was going to be a breeze as well. So, I thought, why the hell not?
Turns out, not only was it a NOT a breeze, it was one helluva hurricane! A Katrina! The terms just floated fast past me because I was used to just focus on the points in the document that people give me. This freelance writer wasn’t thinking deep enough, digging more into the core and trying to understand how to pass the technical know-how to the readers – I burst into a storm of tears.
This experience tells me that I am a blog content writer, a freelance writer with a knack of writing materials which had fewer nuts and bolts. I preferred music to architecture, that’s how I would explain my freelance writing skill which means that with my writing, I can paint you a very pretty picture, make it sing songs, sell products because my writing are often persuasive by nature (blame it on my earlier copywriting experience)….but I can’t build a Sky Scraper with what I write.
Sad but true.
The point of this article is simple. It’s to tell you that not every writer is the same. There are many different types of writers out there who have been freelancing on the Internet. Because they’re tuned to writing a certain type of genre, as versatile as the freelancer is, there is bound to be one or two genres that the freelance writer can’t quite touch. He/she can but it probably won’t be an easy write....(ride) pun intended.
For those looking for a good freelance writer or blog content writer, people like me can give your sales a boost, project a very professional image, send out a clear message with the materials that we write. For those looking for a technical writer, it’s best that you find a freelance writer who can dig deep, far, wide and long into the topic so that the data or information that you’re trying to bring across is not lost on the readers just because it’s lost on a freelance blog content writer like me.
Marsha Maung is a Malaysian-based freelance writer with two kids. She spends her time ferrying her kids around, watering her plants, writing web content, SEO stuff, ghostwriting books and also indulges in the occasional Facebook-ing. Visit her freelance writer website for more information.