How to Write a Great Holiday Letter

After years of trying to write good Christmas letters, I realize that my own letters fall into one of three categories.

1. Too Much Information
2. Too Much “We’re Awesome”
3. Truly Inspirational and Insightful

Too Much Information means I’m telling readers what I ate at every Mexican restaurant on my trip.  Too Much We’re Awesome means I use the letter as a catalog of all my children’s (and pets’) accomplishments.

I want to inspire and teach, not brag and exhaust.

Truly Inspirational and Insightful Holiday Letters teach us something.  They inspire us–and even make us laugh–with the insight we’ve gained this year. When these letters (I’m thinking of some of my favorite over the years) arrive, my husband literally sits down with a cup of coffee to enjoy the humor and insight that he knows the letter will offer.

With this goal in mind, we can eliminate any extraneous information that doesn’t offer insight.  With this goal in mind, we can ask ourselves if we’ve designed a paragraph intended to evoke jealousy or prove our worth.  With this goal in mind, we can purify our motivation to love our reader.

If the sentence doesn’t match these goals, chop it out.

As a devotional practice, I use the Holiday Letter task as a way to reflect on my year.  What did I learn?  How did our family change?  What did we overcome?  What wisdom can we offer now?

These holiday letters inspire.  These holiday letters are worth sending.  And sometimes a great holiday letter will matter more than the cute photo of my children in matching sweaters by the tree.

You can use the “Flair Checklist” below to help with your writing style.  Enjoy!

Flair Checklist

1.   Do I use vivid verbs?
2.   Are my verbs in their strongest form (cutting board test)?
3.   Do I juggle some secret ingredients throughout my writing (semicolons, dashes, commas, parentheses, and colons)?
4.   Do I “stir the pot” with varied sentence structures and lengths?
5.   Have I embellished my writing with garnish in some form?
6.   Have I analyzed my audience? Do I know them?
7.   Do I attempt to build rapport with my readers?
8.   Does my diction match my intent and my audience?
9.   Have I shown my audience that I understand them and have listened to them?
10. Would my audience feel cared for by me? Do I put in some love?
11.  Do I appeal to emotion in this writing (pathos)?
12.  Do I seem trustworthy (ethos)?
13.  Do I engage the reader’s reasoning skills (logos)?
14.  Do I make use of good transition sentences?
15.  Have I demonstrated the importance of my topic? Do I tell my readers why this writing matters?
16.  Was I able to form an analogy to advance my point?
17.  Did I enjoy the process of writing this? What can I do differently to celebrate the writing task?
18.  Do I offer a unique contribution to the conversation surrounding my topic?
19.  Do I avoid cliché in my writing?
20.  Is this writing memorable?
___________________________

What advice would you offer for writing great Holiday Letters?

NOTES:

• If you missed Heather’s popular post, How to Write with Flair, take a minute and be inspired to write better.
• We recommend Heather’s book, How to Write with Flair: Strong verbs, cool punctuation marks, varied sentence lengths and openings, some garnish, and appeals to your audience. (Order the book.)
• The original post is on Heather’s popular blog, Live with Flair, and is used with permission.
• Heather and her husband, Ashley, are Faculty Commons staff at Penn State.  Read what God is doing after last month’s scandal and learn how you might be praying for staff, faculty, students, and others impacted by these events.

How to Market Your Blog

Once you’ve started your blog, you want to find readers. If you are anything like I was a few months ago, you have no idea how to let others know about your blog. Here are the best 5 ways I found to advertise your blog so others can read your material.

1. Send out alerts on Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, or any other social networking site. Simply let others know you have a new blog entry.

2. Find blogs that discuss similar subjects, and comment on these blogs. You can leave a link to your blog so if readers are interested, they can come visit your blog.

3. Make it easy for readers to “subscribe” to your blog. I use feedburner.com. From here, you can set up email registration and RSS feed sign ups for people to easily click to receive automatic updates whenever you post something new.

4. Try posting your blog in the local newspaper on the community blogs page. You can email the editor of your town’s newspaper and see if they want to include your blog.

5. Word of mouth.

What would you add? What ways have you marketed your blogs?
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Related Post on the importance of building relationships through commenting.

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How Do I Start a Blog?

Physically starting a blog is the easy part.  You use a free blogging website like wordpress or blogger, and you follow the simple directions.  You’ll choose a look for your blog (colors, layout, font), you can put in pictures or video (upload files), and you can write whatever you want (posting).  The first time I tried to write a blog, I just followed the directions and used the help key if I needed to.

But What Would I Blog About?

Here are some questions that might direct you to the perfect blogging idea for you:

1.  Am I an expert in anything that allows me to offer advice and insight for others?  (Gardening, cooking, cleaning, public speaking, travel, parenting, exercise)

2.  What topic do I usually talk the most about?

3.  What issues concern me or excite me the most?

4.  Do I have a unique story that could inspire others?

5.  What type of people do I care most about?  What issue does this group care about?

6.  What motivates me to blog?  Do I want to inform?  Do I want to inspire?

The Hook and the Payoff

Every blog needs a hook (a way to get readers interested) and a payoff (a way to satisfy readers with information or insight).  When I started my blog, my hook was a question:  What would it look like to find extraordinary meaning in common things?  How can I live with flair? Common “hooks” for blogs include:  an interesting question, a curious photograph, a provocative quote, a controversy,  or a humorous or emotional story.  The payoff is that readers find a spiritual principle at the end of every blog entry.  I write, “Living with flair means. . . ”  Blogs that showcase family stories or tips for living always have some sort of payoff at the end.  Maybe there’s a bit of humor or an emotional appeal as the blog entry concludes.

How Long Should My Blog Entry Be?

The shorter and the more concise, the better.  Some blogging experts say the best size for a blog entry is 250 words.  Some of mine are much longer (1000) or even much shorter (100), but on average, I try to stay within 250 words.

What if I’m not a good writer?

Check out some quick tips in my earlier post: How to Write with Flair.

Happy Blogging!  Stay tuned for my next blog post:  The Best Tips on How to Market Your Blog and Gain a Strong Readership.

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Public domain photo from Wikimedia Commons

How to Write with Flair

If I’m going to live with flair, I have to think about communicating with flair. Most of us will have thousands of occasions for writing in the next year: emails, text messages, resumes, blog entries, cover letters, articles, love letters, essays, reports, memos, or our next big novel. After ten years of teaching, after reading over six thousand student essays (I counted once), and after analyzing more grammar books than any person should, I wrote this book called “How to Write with Flair.” And then I thought about living with flair, and well, you know the rest.

But back to how to write with flair.

It’s easy. I know 5 tricks. Ready?

1. Choose a verb with flair. Eliminate feeble verbs (am is are was were has have had seems appear exists). These verbs don’t show anything happening. Use exciting verbs. I love verbs like grapple and fritter. Grapple with strong verbs to fritter away the feeble ones.

2. Toggle between the Big 5 punctuation marks: Semicolon, colon, dash, parentheses, comma. Here’s a paragraph that embeds these tricks.

When you want to create complexity and voice in your writing, try using the Big 5. To highlight a part of your sentence–like this one–use dashes. Dashes shout. On the other hand, if you want to whisper and share a secret with an audience (like this one), use parentheses. Parentheses whisper. Semicolons confuse most; they unite full sentences that belong together because the second sentence explains or amplifies the first. Commas help the reader along by following introductory clauses, or they combine two sentences when you want to use a conjunction like and, but, for, or, nor, so (We can talk later about this; commas are really hard unless you had grammar instruction as a kid). Finally, the colon designates that a list or definition will follow. So the Big 5 include: semicolon, colon, dash, parentheses, comma. Do you feel smart?

3. Vary the length of your sentences and change the way they start to create rhythm. See sample paragraph above.

4. Garnish your paragraph with some clever wordplay if you can. Common cleverness in writing includes: puns, repeated first words, self-answering questions, understatement, just being funny, just being YOU.

5. Engage your audience. Establish rapport by talking to them. Are you wondering how this works? Just notice them in your writing (like I just did). Make it obvious that you are talking to people.

Try these simple things to create some flair in your emails, newsletters, reports, or blogs today. Enjoy some written flair.

Originally published as 5 Ways to Write with Flair.

CCC staff, so we can better serve you, please subscribe here to receive weekly emails of e4e posts, notifications of training, and more.

How a Simple Blog Can Change the World

Just two months ago, I decided to start a blog.   A blog is just a shared online journal.   Some blogs are political commentary or news, some are private reflections, some are inspirational, some are focused on very specific topics like homeschooling or cooking, and some are family records.  I’m an older woman with absolutely no training in blogging, and I was shocked how easy it was.  Earlier that day, I had coffee with a friend who told me how many blogs she follows every day. I listened as she listed all her favorite blogs.  Apparently, women all over the world have blogs they read with such devotion that they never miss a day.  As I asked other friends, male and female, young and old, I found out that they can read up to 20 blogs a day, every day.  As a writer, I wondered about this new phenomenon of the blog world and the impact it might have on so many readers.

That very afternoon, I thought about launching my own blog to help inspire people.  I didn’t need an agent or a book contract to write a message to the world.  I didn’t need anything fancy or expensive.  I could sit in my kitchen and just blog for free!

I wrote a book called, “How to Write with Flair,” and I had been wondering what it would look like to live with flair.  What would it look like to embellish my day, make it beautiful, and celebrate common moments?  I found a free blogging website (blogspot.com), I chose a template, and I posted my first day of living with flair.  My simple site is:   http://www.livewithflair.blogspot.com/

That day, 5 people read my blog!  It wasn’t much, but it was a start.  That afternoon, I wrote a little essay called, “I Believe in Living with Flair,” and I sent it to our local NPR radio for their essay contest.  The next day, it won.  Two days later, I went on the radio to talk about my blog.  Now, in 2 months, 1,200 unique visitors have found my blog, and at least 100 people read it each night.   All of a sudden, I had a huge platform for ministry.  It’s a daily feature in our newspaper, and I post my blog entries to facebook, twitter, and my gmail account.  37 different countries have people reading my blog including Russia, Tanzania, and Japan.

As I prayed about how to use my blog evangelistically, I knew God was leading me to write daily inspirational pieces to encourage readers (not just women) to think about spiritual things.  Every few blog posts, I mention Jesus specifically, but mostly, my blog is a sowing blog.  I want to help prepare the soil of a person’s heart and invite them to think about God.  Each day, I try to write in ways that showcase a spiritual principle.

Blogging is an incredible ministry tool!  Not only that, but it’s a tool for my own personal growth.  My daily blog entries have become my personal reflection time as I thank God for each day’s flair.  I’ve never been happier or more eager to see where God will “show up” each day.

Anyone can do it!  In my next article, I’ll show you how to start your own blog, how to find a topic, how to get readers, and how to see God use it to advance his kingdom.  Stay tuned for tips and strategies to launch a huge ministry from your home computer.

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Post by Heather Holleman

Heather Holleman teaches writing courses in the English Department at Penn State and, as campus staff with Campus Crusade for Christ, helps direct the ministry for graduate students with her husband, Ashley.  They have two daughters and three cats.  Her favorite activities include running the neighborhood fitness group, hosting parties, and drinking fresh ground coffee with various flavored creamers.  Her daily blog, “How to Live with Flair,” challenges readers to find extraordinary meaning in common things.