Passionate-writing

I am a newbie to Hubpages, I've never written a book, had an editorial accepted or had an article published. My writing experience-3 quarters of English composition at the local community college enroute to an associate degree in Computer Aided Design. (Even that was so many years ago that it is a vague memory.) Even in my own humble opinion, that hardly sounds likely to qualify me to offer advise on internet published article writing.

Now with full disclosure behind me, I have some advise to share from my limited experience. Like most people, I wanted to get off to a successful start, so I began reading “How To” articles. One nugget of advice I encountered frequently in answer to the question: “What do I write about” was “write about your passions.” On the surface that seems to make sense. Surely that would be something one would be knowledgeable about without a lot of extensive research. However, before a novice writer tackles writing about their passions I offer a couple of reasons why one might want to rethink that as a beginning point.

It is the goal of all authors to produce quality writings, and passionate writing offers two serious challenges. I discovered these after having attempted them in two of the three quarters of English composition.

1. It is easy to overestimate the knowledge level of the reader resulting in the use of terms and jargon completely foreign to them thereby causing the reader to lose interest.

1. It is easy to lose objectivity when we are writing about passions, causing us to state conclusions based on unresearched, biased and questionable data. This will cause the reader to raise flags of suspicion and prevent the positive reputation building needed for success as an author.

With the aid of good professors, I was able to, in both instances, end up with a quality product, but it took many revisions after much constructive criticism. My easiest project turned out to be one that I was not emotionally involved in at all. We were asked to describe the person in front of us. I didn't “know” the man I had to describe. He was a casual acquaintance met in the class. Thereby allowing me to write an unbiased, objective description. That was the purpose of the project and had I had that lesson first, I probably would have chosen different subjects for my other assignments.

Will I avoid passionate topics? Of course not. But I will be on the lookout for these pitfalls.