The Writer's Diet: Put to the Test!

I discovered something very interesting with this assignment: I'm a good writer, but only in the right context.

I tested my last blog post about Wed and Data Mining on the Writer's Diet and was very disappointed when they diagnosed my writing as FLABBY. Flabby? Hardly! And yet, the website had correctly counted my uses of "it," "this," "that," etc. So maybe the Writer's Diet has a point.

After looking over Yahoo's Style Guide, I could come up with reasons that made me feel less awful about my online writing skills. For starters, I know very specifically who my audience is. My audience are my classmates, my peers, my friends. So of course I'm writing my blogs in a very conversational way! On a related note, my "voice" on my blog is my own. My friendly, class voice as opposed to the "voice" I would use in a formal paper.

Hoping to reclaim my sense of having good writing skills, I decided to test the two introductory paragraphs of my thesis on the Writer's Diet. It was a first draft, sure, but I felt confident that my professional writing style would score me more points!

I was right! My thesis draft scored higher on the Writer's Diet. I am now FIT & TRIM! Yeah, I did a little fist pump like the Success Baby meme.

Writing skills can can always be improved upon, but I am proud to report that I am still a good writer when I'm putting my mind to it. The lesson I learned is that blogging to your friends and classmates is a recipe for poor writing! Let's be honest with one another, you don't speak or write to your friends with perfect grammar and polished word choice in mind, do you? No. And neither do I.

If I ever find myself in a situation where I am blogging and tweeting for a wider audience than my friends and peers, then I will kick my professional writing skills into gear. For now, I can make peace with being a flabby online writer.

For the record. This post scored me NEEDS TONING!