I hosted my very first 'Young Adult Carer Blog Writing' group call back in May 2022.
This session was an opportunity for young adult carers with the same passion for increasing the profile of Young Adult Carer to network, share ideas and help one another.
Personally, I was really excited by the broad range of experiences of the people on the call. The suggestions of different topics to explore and the enthusiasm for this group to be a regular thing.
One common theme emerging was all about using our experience and knowledge to help others. But as a group, we found that the biggest challenge to blog writing was that many of us have never written a blog before.
Firstly, we spoke about what we thought were the most important things to remember when starting to write a blog. So, I thought it would be a good idea to share them here in the hopes that they might inspire others.
Here are some of the things that we came up with:
1. Be you
Whether the blog includes a part of your story, or it captures your spin on things when talking about the tough stuff, blogs are a way for you to put ‘you’ in your writing. As young adult carers, our experiences are a big part of our motivation for talking about key issues and so including a personal experience or flavour is really important.
When starting a blog, it is important to find creative ways to be you and let your personality shine through. This will help us to write the type of blog that we would like to read.
2. Be relatable
One tip was about focusing our blogs on the topics that are important to both us or our audience. Whether it is a topic of interest, a piece of research you have done or it is something that you feel that you and your audience might share, these topics will provide a really strong basis for an interesting, informative and engaging blog.
3. Be approachable
As a group we agreed that none of us are the experts, but we want to share our experiences and learning to help other young adult carers, whether that is about blog writing itself or a topic important to us.
As part of that, we talked about the importance of language and tone, to make sure that our blogs are both engaging and informative. It’s also about writing it in such a way that invites others to add to it or ask questions.
4. Be uplifting
We all have experiences of dealing with our own tough stuff and as we build resilience, we can often find humour to be empowering. When we talked about what we would want to see from a blog, we shared comments about it being uplifting and encompassing our sense of humour. This would help to talk about challenging or emotional topics in a light-hearted way that leaves people feeling positive.
5. Be wacky with ideas
With unique lived experiences, we each have a lot to contribute and write about and so this piece of advice was about being unafraid to explore new topics or look at things from a different perspective. It was also about removing any hesitation or self-doubt and just going for it!
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