New Blogging Styles That You Need To Try

Creativity has no limits, and rightly so, it shouldn’t have. Writing, too, requires plenty of creative freedom. Writers, especially us - the bloggers, devise and apply ideas that are mostly unheard of. This allows us to tell what readers are looking on search engines for.

It was 2013, and I was working on a college-level paper project when I encountered a physics website. I stumbled upon one of the pages and found useful & relevant information. But something that surprised and inspired me was their way of writing.

The writer had written one sentence per paragraph.

And the sentences were even shorter than this one.

Like this.

I liked the way such content was presented in single-lined paragraphs.

I wondered how many people write like this, and after a year of stumbles, I found out that not many do.

But I also found out various other types of blogging & writing that were as amazing as this linear writing thing.

I do hate diluted articles with a mere hundred words and loads of unnecessary blocks. But blogging isn’t always about building with sentences, larger paragraphs and perfect citations. Imperfect articles can deliver important information in just few sentences.

In this article, I have collected a list of few content writing styles that exist and not many know about but can be used by bloggers to create useful content for their readers.

To list, we will be understanding:

Content Centric Writing

Possibly the most used writing type in the world. In it, you start with a heading, and then that’s followed by subheadings, paragraphs, images, etc., irrespective of the order. In content-centric writing, as the name suggests, the focus remains on content, and such writing type is used to elaborate topics in detail. Paragraphs are mostly larger, and fewer other elements like bullet lists, icons, blockquotes, etc., are used.  Every 7 in 10 blogs you read are content-centric.

Example of Content-Centric Writing

From: https://gauravtiwari.org/public-places-study/

Single Paragraph Blogging

Sometimes — a single paragraph is sufficient to provide all information about a specific topic - these mostly don’t even need a heading or title. Such blogs are called asides or miniblogs — blogs but with minimal content.

Examples of Single Paragraph/mini-blogging:

One-liner blogging

Like miniblogs, one-liner blogs can be called as microblogs. Like in Twitter, where character limit of 280 characters are set — in one-liner blogging, the bloggers reference something and provide anchor link to resource instead of writing about that. Reblogging on Tumblr is a fine example of one-liner blogging.

Example of One-liner blogging:

Compilation

A compilation — as the name suggests, is a collection of content taken from various resources and then combined altogether for reader’s convenience. Compilations are very useful for those looking for aggregate information at one place.

But legally, you may fall on the wrong side of the law if you don’t do it carefully.

If you are looking to write compilations — make sure you copy content from the places only from where it’s allowed under fair usage. Some writers, instead of copying content from such resources, write their own piece for each reference and then put a link to the resource.

You can find many such on sites like boredpanda, buzzfeed etc.

Versed Blogging

It’s the format story/novel writers use. In it all you need is content. No headings, no images or links — only text paragraphs.

Example:

• Nonstandard Integers as Complex Numbers
• How a young woman lost her identity?

Caption or Image Based Blogging

Sometimes called Viral Blogging, such blogging style is quite popular now-a-days. In it, the writer begins with a video or image and then writes a whole story about it. Such articles may or may not contain other stuffs like lists, quizzes and all but the whole matter lies around the video or image.

Once again, viral sites like buzzfeed, mashable and boredpanda use such blogging style.

Underblogging

Underblogging is like commenting where you pick an idea or concept and then wrap your thoughts around that idea.

Medium has such kind of reply system.

Infographics are shared using the same idea as well. Underblogs are less developed and mostly contain amateur stuffs.

Q&A Based Blogging

Interviews, Quizzes and what-not. Question & Answer-based blogging has recently taken good shape and has emerged as one of the most profitable blogging styles. In this — the writer starts with a subject and adds plenty of questions with it — which will ultimately be answered by either the subject (interviewee) or the readers reading the article (in case of quizzes).

This is easily the laziest way to do blogging but, strangely, the best way to generate interaction.

Reply Based Blogging

Looking for DIY answers? Wikipedia isn’t going to help you. There are websites and blogs are totally focused on answering your day-to-day questions. In this, the writer begins with a question and adds his/her idea about it to propose it as an answer. The answer may or may not work for you but still gives you some idea about the trouble you are encountering.

Reference based blogging

Quora and StackExchange Network are the most acclaimed Q&A sites right now. Some answers on these sites are amazing and worth making a blog post about. Many blogs use leech content from these sites to generate traffic & revenue for themselves. All they need to do extra is to add their own inputs, optimize for plagiarism and also for search engines.

Social Media compiling

Several blogs, mostly the ones with viral niche, copy tweets/status updates from social network sites to form an article and target revenue generation. They add their personal blatant in between the tweets/updates to link those together. All such is done for no intellectual good but they surely kill at earning and traffic.

There are several other blogging types in the wind now — to include One-page blogging, single-product blogging, and much more.

As said creativity has no limits and as a blogger you’ll always be allowed to be experimental with your writing. Let me know in comments if you write in any such of the ways  — or even in better ways.