3 Quick Tips for Starting a Blog:

• If you’re looking for a customizable WordPress theme, consider Atahualpa, which he’s using. It has many options that are relatively easy to work with.
• Need ideas for your first few posts? Think of them as the base of a pyramid. Write about general topics that will be helpful to link back to later. My dad has written a few of these—for example, “Arteries Vs. Veins: How to Tell the Difference and Stop the Bleeding.” He links to it in other posts about wounds.
• Learn the art of the nut graf. It’s one little paragraph that can make the difference between readers zoning out and reading on with interest.

—

Leigh Ann Otte is a freelance writer and an expert in writing website articles. Her specialties include health, long-term care and aging issues. Contact her at la [at] lawordsmith [dot] com.

My posts have gotten more and more personal on that site—different from what I usually do for clients. It’s fun to incorporate life experiences every once in a while.

I had a client ask me this week about how personal blog posts should be. I may blog about that at some point. It was a good question. How personal are your posts?

—

Leigh Ann Otte is a freelance website-article writer and blogger. Her specialties include health, long-term care and aging issues. She’s a journalist at heart, a former magazine editor and, in her own mind, a famous actress with 10 miniature dogs all dressed in tutus.

But I would like to keep folks up-to-date on my latest writing projects, so I’m starting this little blog. I plan to post no more than once a week—maybe even once a month—because it’s more of a newsletter/blog meld.

So, if you’d like to hear from me periodically, please subscribe. (See the box to the right.) I’ll not bug you too much, and you might find some downright interesting articles to read in the meantime.

You must read this post.

OK, whatever, you can read it if you want. I had to get the lede over with so I could get to …

the nut graf! In my opinion, you see, this little paragraph (this one right here) is one of the most important parts of an article. It’s what keeps your readers reading. It’s what most blog posts are missing. And it’s one simple addition that will improve your composition—be it a newspaper piece; magazine feature; editorial or, yes, blog post—by leaps and bounds.

What Is a Nut Graf?

At The Philadelphia Inquirer, reporters and editors called it the “You may have wondered why we invited you to this party?” section.
—Chip Scanlan, Poynter

It’s like the thesis statement in a term paper.
—Celeste Mitchell, mediabistro.com

While perusing a post, have you ever thought, why am I reading this? And then you don’t find out until near the end what the point of the thing was? That post may be craving a nut graf.

Nut graf is a journalism term. So is a related word, lede. You gotta know it too.

Lede (or lead): The first paragraph (or so) of an article. What draws the reader in.

Nut graf: The paragraph that tells what the story’s about, so people know why to keep reading—and whether they want to. It’s usually the second paragraph. It can, however, be combined with the lede, come a bit later or be longer. (News paragraphs are shorter than book ones—even one or two sentences long.)

Examples of Nut Grafs
… straight from your blogs

• Second paragraph: “Value doctors as listeners to prevent primary care burn out” (KevinMD.com)
• Second paragraph: “Bus stop diagnosis” (Musings of a Dinosaur)
• Third paragraph: “Navy investigates Murtha’s death – CNN’s Elizabeth Cohen reports unhelpful advice” (Saving Money and Surviving the Healthcare Crisis)

Without a nut graf, posts often read like diary entries or pointless compositions. And maybe that’s the, well, point. “If a writer has trouble figuring out what to say in a nut graph,” says journalist Michelle V. Rafter at her blog WordCount, “it could be because they haven’t figured out what the story they’re writing is about.”

Disclaimer

Not every blog post needs a nut graf—some narrative stories or really short posts, for example. But in my opinion, most can improve with them.

Further Reading

Chip Scanlan has a thorough article about nut grafs over at Poynter.

—

Leigh Ann Otte is a professional writer, editor and blogger.

A version of this article was originally published March 2, 2010, on Leigh Ann’s previous blog The Doctor Writer: Helping Medical Professionals Bring Out Their Inner Writer. Read more posts from that blog here.

Images courtesy www.pdclipart.org.

Marilyn Monroe, USO Camp Show, 1954

Q: Was Marilyn Monroe really a size 14?

A: With her hourglass figure, Marilyn Monroe has become today’s poster gal for curvy women. “You think a size 12 is fat?” goes the argument. “Well, Marilyn Monroe was a size 14!” … or 12 … or 10.

… Until some dern naysayer pipes up. “Actually,” (says a whiny voice, nose in the air—at least in my head) “she’d be a size 6 by today’s standards.” … or 4 … or 2.

OK, I must admit, I never thought Marilyn Monroe looked like a size 14. She was 5’5 1/2″, for goodness sake. If we’re going to make an argument, it’d be good if it were fact-based, so I did some digging. And I found the truth. And the truth, my friends, is not black-and-white.

Marilyn Monroe’s Real Size
First of all, guess what. Though celebrated for being curvaceous, Monroe was on the low end of a normal weight. Her website (yes, she has one) says she weighed 115 to 120 pounds. That’s an 18.8 to 19.7 BMI. Normal is 18.5 to 24.9.

So, as you might imagine, she was not a size 14.

Her site lists two sets of measurements. The studio claimed 37-23-36. Her dressmaker said 35-22-35. Either way, it’s a good thing she had a dressmaker: Though U.S. charts vary, her waist today would be around a size 00/0, hips a size 2 to 6 and bust a size 6 to 10 (or around a medium).

So, although it’s not clear to me what overall size Marilyn Monroe would be, a size 10 dress would probably hang like a sack on her. I’d suggest a little number in a 4 to 6.

Are you surprised?

—

Leigh Ann Otte is a professional writer, editor and blogger.

This article was originally published on Leigh Ann’s former blog Hollywood Weight Watch: Rebooting Our Perception of Healthy-Weight Women. Read more posts from that blog here.

Photo courtesy National Archives, via pingnews.

Bollywood

Used to be, Bollywood actresses were curvy. (Like it used to be here, come to think of it.) But alas, the U.K.’s Telegraph reports that Bollywood is shrinking:

“There’s been a lot of changes in the last decade, whether it’s in modelling or in Bollywood,” said Venu Hirani, a nutritionist and fitness consultant in Mumbai.

“Today, the basic requirement for someone wanting to go into either is that they need to be a (US) size zero,” she said.

And check this out:

“Now I have more and more of the younger generation who don’t really need to lose weight but tell me they need to knock off five kilogrammes (11 pounds).”

Argh! No, Bollywood, noooo!

—

Leigh Ann Otte is a professional writer, editor and blogger.

This article was originally published March 5, 2010, on Leigh Ann’s former blog Hollywood Weight Watch: Rebooting Our Perception of Healthy-Weight Women. Read more posts from that blog here.

Blogger Molly McCaffrey

I’ve long believed that ultra-skinny ideals—thinking we have to be stick thin to be beautiful—set us up for failure. Why even try to lose weight with such a daunting goal?

Yesterday, fiction writer Molly McCaffrey explained the issue brilliantly at her blog I Will Not Diet:

Finally, I believe that our country’s obsession with dieting makes us actually eat more. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: when we tell people that they need to look like Angelina Jolie to be beautiful, it makes it very easy for them to give up trying to be healthy and grab another box of Mac ‘n Cheese. I truly believe that as long as we hold women to standards that are unattainable for regular people, we will have an obesity problem in our country.

Bravo, Molly McCaffrey! And hear, hear!

—

Leigh Ann Otte is a professional writer, editor and blogger.

This article was originally published March 5, 2010, on Leigh Ann’s former blog Hollywood Weight Watch: Rebooting Our Perception of Healthy-Weight Women. Read more posts from that blog here.

A few tips were repeated throughout: Cut everything you can, read your work out loud, you will never be satisfied with what you’ve written. (Seriously. Lots said that.) Many gave the age-old advice, read, read, read. But novelist Will Self said, “Stop reading fiction—it’s all lies anyway, and it doesn’t have anything to tell you that you don’t know already.” Another theme: Sometimes, you can break the rules.

Here are my top-five favorite tips from the article.

“Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.” —Roddy Doyle

“The first 12 years are the worst.” —Anne Enright

“Don’t look back until you’ve written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceeding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in . . . The edit.” —Will Self

“If you have to read, to cheer yourself up read biographies of writers who went insane.” —Colm Toibin

“Remember you love writing. It wouldn’t be worth it if you didn’t. If the love fades, do what you need to and get it back.” —Al Kennedy

—

Leigh Ann Otte is a professional writer, editor and blogger.

A version of this article was originally published March 25, 2010, on Leigh Ann’s previous blog The Doctor Writer: Helping Medical Professionals Bring Out Their Inner Writer. Read more posts from that blog here.

Image courtesy pdclipart.org.

And doctor writers are indeed not alone. From Anton Chekhov to Michael Crichton, they have a long history of success. Writer Andrea Crawford explored the doctor-writer connection in the magazine Poets & Writers last year. “Medical training, like writing,” she found, “requires a long view of life; and learning to always be aware of—and separate from—one’s emotions helps to sharpen observational skills.”

Here are some quotes from doctor-writers. Do any ring true for you?

“Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other.Though it’s disorderly, it’s not so dull, and besides neither of them loses anything from my infidelity. If I did not have my medical work I doubt if I could have given my leisure and my spare thoughts to literature. There is no discipline in me.”
—Anton Chekhov, 1860–1904, Russian author of The Seagull

“When people ask me which I would rather give up, writing or medicine, it’s like being asked which eye I’d prefer to have poked out with a spoon: neither, and please use a fork.”
—Chris Adrian, 1970– , American author of The Children’s Hospital

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1809–1894, American author

I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.”
—William Carlos Williams, 1883–1963, American poet

“While medicine creates material for writing, perhaps even more important is that it also creates a psychological and emotional need to write.”
—Daniel Mason, contemporary American author of The Piano Turner

“But being able to talk to so many patients from so many walks of life gives a tremendous window into people’s lives. This is not to say I want to write about individual patients, but I think that after listening to the concerns of people who are so different from me, I can more realistically portray characters who are so different from me.”
—Daniel Mason, contemporary American author of The Piano Turner

“I really think I probably never would have written this book if I hadn’t been in medical school. In some ways, there was a thrill to writing, in the sense that I wasn’t supposed to be doing it.”
—Daniel Mason, contemporary American author of The Piano Turner

“Poetry, while it probably does not actually do nothing in general, does nothing (to my knowledge) for a spastic colon. Yet it seems to me that good doctors and good writers are both likely to be keen social observers, and that when you are doing good work in medicine or in fiction you are making obvious previously unseen connections.”
—Chris Adrian, 1970– , American author of The Children’s Hospital

“When they ask me, as of late they frequently do, how I have for so many years continued an equal interest in medicine and the poem, I reply that they amount for me to nearly the same thing.”
—William Carlos Williams, 1883–1963, American poet

Wonder what it’s like to be a screenwriter? Check out Dreams on Spec. And get convinced to write a book.

This documentary, which came out in 2007, follows three screenwriters as they bloody their fists on wall after wall trying to get their scripts made into movies.

I have a background in acting, so I came to the film with a knowledge of the movie biz. I gotta say, I believe this portrayal. Hollywood likes to pitch itself as the land where dreams come true. Well, chasing dreams has its price.

Check out the preview:

Dreams on Spec‘s website lists various ways to buy the movie. You can also watch it for free on Hulu.

—

Leigh Ann Otte is a professional writer, editor and blogger.

A version of this article was originally published March 9, 2010, on Leigh Ann’s previous blog The Doctor Writer: Helping Medical Professionals Bring Out Their Inner Writer. Read more posts from that blog here.