Painting A Picture When We Write Content

byCalChrisH

3.8K followers

6 years ago

Recently I have been continuing with my boot camp training, however, I've spent more time clicking around and reading posts, following members and just learning more about WA overall. What I've noticed more than anything is there are some really talented writers in this community. These observations led me to my thoughts and the content for this post.

As some of you may know by now I am a retired police officer. For my entire 23 year career I had the opportunity to use writing every day in one form or another. I wrote letters to supervisors as a patrol officer, I wrote reports ever day and most importantly I took notes at the scene of every investigation. The notes I took were important because they described the scene of a crime or an accident and could subsequently be used in court proceedings.

There were two people during my career that helped me to write better just by telling me to paint a picture with words when you write. One was a Sergeant and the other was a Commonwealthy Attorney ( DA or prosecutor in some jurisdictions ). I remember vividly the night the Sergeant read my report about a Hit and Run accident and said you need to paint a picture of the damage so that a judge or jury can accurately picture in their minds what was described to them. He said you need to state where the damage is by using inches or feet from certain locations on the vehicle and describe exactly how extensive the damage is and how much debris was on the ground. Then, the commonwealth attorney told me my notes always need to paint the picture of a serious accident scene where there was serious injury or death so that the jury feels like they were at the scene of the crash.

The truck in the picture above is my son's truck after he had an accident. I would describe this as a 2015 Chevrolet Silverado 4X4 pickup silver in color that sustained extensive right rear quarter panel damage and right rear bumper damage. The damage is everything on the quarter panel a foot to a foot and a half behind the right rear tire. Also, the first two feet of the right rear bumper was separated from the truck. I would estimate the monetary damage to the truck to be approximately $4,000.

So, you should be wondering what in the world does the picture of this wrecked truck and why should painting a picture with our content have to do with Affiliate Marketing and writing blog posts. My thinking is, whenever we write blog posts the content should be so descriptive and accurate that it paints a picture so that the reader can picture in their mind what we are trying to relay and to draw that reader to our service or products.

Please feel free to leave me your thoughts!