Blog vs Article: Spot the Differences!

As a freelance writer, it’s often tempting to think of yourself as being able to do all kinds of writing equally well. So what if you got your start in technical writing, you wonder how hard can it be to break into the world of copywriting? Or vice versa.

The reality, however, is that each type of writing takes a unique skill set, and while you can certainly move from one specialty to another with as much ease as you would shift from one hand to another if you were ambidextrous, you still need to be aware of the different types of skills required for different types of writings.

In this post we’re going to discuss the oft-confused worlds of blog writing versus article writing. They sound similar enough – after all if you can put together 300-500 words of coherent text in an article, why can’t you do the same for a blog, right? While some principles of writing for the web apply to both blogs and articles, there are some crucial differences too.

So to help you determine whether you are an article writer or a blogger, here’s my quick checklist of what I think the two entail:


A Blog: An Article:
1. Contains more opinions 1. Contains more facts
2. May not necessarily be well-researched 2. Must be backed by factual research and analysis
3. Is written in a commentary style 3. Is written in a news/journalist style
4. May be anywhere between a single word to over 1000 words (e.g. Seth’s blog versus Viperchill’s blog) 4. Is generally between 500-1000 words
5. May liberally showcase the author’s personality 5. Is written from an unbiased, neutral perspective
6. May contain lots of visual interest in the form of embedded images or videos 6. Generally contains more text, along with maybe relevant screenshots or product images
7. Should ideally be updated regularly and frequently 7. Does not have any “recency” criteria
8. May review a product, service or idea based on author’s opinion and experience (e.g. a blog post about a chicken roast recipe you tried) 8. Provides a factual, balanced account of a product, service or idea (e.g. an article containing a recipe on how to roast a chicken)
9. Is written in a friendly, conversational tone (liberal use of first person and second person tone) 9. Is written in a friendly but formal tone (preferred usage is third person)
10. May not necessarily require the use of SEO or keyword incorporation 10. Is often used for the purposes of better search rankings and therefore dependent on a great SEO and keyword-incorporation strategy.


So there you have it. My personal opinion of what differentiates a blog from an article. When I correspond with clients, I make sure to tell them exactly what kind of an article or blog they’ll receive. If it’s a blog project, I make sure I tell them it will be written in a conversational tone, contain author viewpoints, etc. If it’s an article project, I let them know about our emphasis on factual data collection, research and source citations. I think it helps make them feel secure that I know exactly what kind of writing they can expect from us.

Your turn. Please add to my checklist above anything pertinent you can think of that differentiates the two; I’m sure I’ve missed some points! How do you differentiate between a blog and an article? Tell us!