It is dangerous to write for Helium.com if you succumb to temptation.

The owners of the site urge you to write to rate incessantly as if being at the site twenty-four hours a day would make you a better writer and earn you many single cents. Instead your writing talent, if you have it, decays.

Remember that you do not become a better writer from writing half-intelligible articles about caring for a Great Dane, creating a quilt, complaining about Medicare or recognizing the benefits of a Corvette. Good writing is not a matter of converting random thoughts into print.

You become a better writer by first learning English, its punctuation and its grammar slang is not being a good writer, it is being a lazy writer. Remember that you become a better writer by reading and seeing what great writers have produced. You should, as a minimum, have a writer whom you would like to emulate.

All too often people with logical minds like engineers think that good writing is a matter of writing to series of logical bullets on the subject. On the other hand, I find many women think that good writing is "being human." The result, oftentimes, can only be described as ignorant slush.

Your writing should be based on more than gut feelings or your mother's intuition. Facts should be clear. Remember that Wikipedia is a collection of other people's facts and other people's English. It is not a great writing site nor is it a reliable source of information. Everything you learn from Wikipedia needs to be verified in another source.

However, even a set of facts do not constitute good writing. Hemingway's "Old Man and the Sea." The facts are that a man and a boy go fishing and kill a marlin. They attach it to the boat but sharks, attracted by the blood, eat the carcass. They return home. What dross.

Hemingway turns this story into a superlative tale of human life and human endeavor in which the boy learns much of life. Much of Helium writing is the former set of unattractive facts. We should all try to do better. Write perhaps one article a month but make it count.

Right now 99% of Helium articles do not count.

Learn more about this author, John Graham.
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