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I'd like to discuss something I feel is very, very important. The standards to which the PMC community hold its blogs.
I recently made a blog adressing the originality of certain styles of houses. Now I was more suprised at the "hate", I use that term lightly, on the length and quality of the blog itself more than the hate on the subject. I was told that it was lacking in length and quality and someone went as far as to say I put absolutely not effort into it. That was completely false and I was mildly offended by his rash assumption. He had no right to attack my writing skills based on the length of my blog. I once wrote a 2 page paper on the meaning of Clint Eastwood by Gorillaz (in which i made a 96), a 2 page paper about the origin of Canada containing a buff moose and 80's rock music (made a 90), and a 5 page comic (front and back too) about personified trancendentalism. I got a 98 on the comic even though it was 3 days late and 10 points were subtracted from the total grade each day.I feel that the length doesn't matter because if you are efficient with your words. You have no need to write two pages for something that only needs one paragraph.. It was really just a quick blog portraying my feelings about the said subject. Since when does the internet actually want to read a lot? It's ridiculous to hold something so unique to such trivial standards. Just because you like to write a lot doesn't mean someone else should too. If they just wan't to write a little bit, don't tell them they should write more.
The only time you should ever tell someone that they're writing isn't quality is if you have a degree in quality writing and divine consent. Besides it's just rude. Don't hold an everyday joe to the same standards as Edgar Allen Poe or Jules Verne or John Green. If they don't write much or are a bad speller you shouldn't just blow them off as a bad writer because sometimes they might have something important to say. You should look at the cause in which they are writing for rather than the grammar or punctuation. Also you should never mock someones blog. Constructive criticism is always better than being mean. People write as much as they feel, so if a comment is longer than the blog itself, thats fine. If someone writes a short blog and another writes a longer comment, it's viewed as "sad". I garuntee if someone wrote a 5 paragraph blog and it got a 10 paragraph comment that no one would mock the blog. Short blogs with long comments aren't "sad", it's the people who make fun of the blogger for it.
Thats just my two cents. Really though, you wouldn't judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree. Also I bad grammared somewhere in there with an incorrect use of "it's" and I can't find it so just ignore it or something. I would love to hear your thoughts and diamonds are welcome. Thank you for your time.
I recently made a blog adressing the originality of certain styles of houses. Now I was more suprised at the "hate", I use that term lightly, on the length and quality of the blog itself more than the hate on the subject. I was told that it was lacking in length and quality and someone went as far as to say I put absolutely not effort into it. That was completely false and I was mildly offended by his rash assumption. He had no right to attack my writing skills based on the length of my blog. I once wrote a 2 page paper on the meaning of Clint Eastwood by Gorillaz (in which i made a 96), a 2 page paper about the origin of Canada containing a buff moose and 80's rock music (made a 90), and a 5 page comic (front and back too) about personified trancendentalism. I got a 98 on the comic even though it was 3 days late and 10 points were subtracted from the total grade each day.I feel that the length doesn't matter because if you are efficient with your words. You have no need to write two pages for something that only needs one paragraph.. It was really just a quick blog portraying my feelings about the said subject. Since when does the internet actually want to read a lot? It's ridiculous to hold something so unique to such trivial standards. Just because you like to write a lot doesn't mean someone else should too. If they just wan't to write a little bit, don't tell them they should write more.
The only time you should ever tell someone that they're writing isn't quality is if you have a degree in quality writing and divine consent. Besides it's just rude. Don't hold an everyday joe to the same standards as Edgar Allen Poe or Jules Verne or John Green. If they don't write much or are a bad speller you shouldn't just blow them off as a bad writer because sometimes they might have something important to say. You should look at the cause in which they are writing for rather than the grammar or punctuation. Also you should never mock someones blog. Constructive criticism is always better than being mean. People write as much as they feel, so if a comment is longer than the blog itself, thats fine. If someone writes a short blog and another writes a longer comment, it's viewed as "sad". I garuntee if someone wrote a 5 paragraph blog and it got a 10 paragraph comment that no one would mock the blog. Short blogs with long comments aren't "sad", it's the people who make fun of the blogger for it.
Thats just my two cents. Really though, you wouldn't judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree. Also I bad grammared somewhere in there with an incorrect use of "it's" and I can't find it so just ignore it or something. I would love to hear your thoughts and diamonds are welcome. Thank you for your time.
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I apologize for trying to do so, you're a great writer :)
Lets have no more drama.
Anyway just my opinion from roaming the interwebs. ;)
People will complain about shortness, even if the article is concise and well developed. Generally, a good blog post shouldn’t be THAT long. It’s hard to read on a screen, there are short attention spans, and not every idea needs to be turned into a seventeen-book-series, if you know what I mean.
If it’s a really good article, length doesn’t really matter. It takes what it takes.
Your article is probably fine, but if people are complaining about length they might really just be unable to articulate what they really want to complain about—why didn’t you say more about the topic? Why didn’t you talk about X when you said Y?
“It’s too short” is one of those vague complaints people use to cover a lot of things. They think that you know what they mean when they say it—“you should have talked about this more or that one sentence was too short”—but you really can’t know unless you ask. Or, just ignore it if you don’t think it’s worth your time. But more people are probably just going to complain about the length if you don’t change something about the article that’s at the root of the problem.
Honestly, you might have said all there is to say about it and that’s that. Or you might not and you think you did, but you didn’t. It’s hard to say and that’s your call to make.
I don’t think you can say when people should or should not judge writing quality unless they have a degree. The author of Twilight has a degree in English. Clearly, it didn’t help her.
Academic writing is not the same as blog writing—they teach you to write essays there, not blog posts on a Minecraft website or novels or poems. Using that as a standard here is like saying that a professional from Mojang should come in every time someone wants to make a new skin. It’s not feasible. The target audience for this game is pre-teen to young adult. You aren’t going to find a ten year old with a degree, but you might find one that realizes that you are spelling a word wrong and posts a comment about it.
I think that yes, correcting spelling can come off as pretentious and mean, but people who do that generally don’t do it because they want you to cry. They are saying, “hey, can you please fix this for me to better understand and engage with what you’re trying to say here?” It’s not that they hate you, it’s that they hate the typo.
I agree that this is a Minecraft site and not some fancy writing blog. People should be able to make mistakes here—and they do make those mistakes. But people are also allowed to notice those mistakes.
There is always going to be someone who points out a typo or spelling error if there’s typos or spelling errors. If there are none, well, then nobody is going to point them out. But they could always complain about something else that may or may not be relevant and you have to take that in and think—should I revise?
If you close off immediately and just focus on the fact that people are talking about the article and not what’s in the article—then you’re going to miss when people are ACTUALLY giving you good feedback about improving your blog posts.
Best of luck, thanks for addressing this issue.
In school, you are expected to maintain a standard of writing that adheres to proper spelling, grammar, punctuation, and so forth. In university and college, they are grading you on your ability to use words effectively. All you are handing in is your words—so they grade that quite seriously because it’s all they have to prove that you’ve learned the course material.
But that’s not the same thing as a blog post. There are no grades. There are no word count requirements or topics you have to pick from to write on.
So why do people immediately think of school as a standard for writing?
Literacy is something closely tied to school because that’s where we all learned to read and write in the first place. We associate writing and reading with education, but there are more published authors in the world with nothing more than their high-school degree than there are authors who went to university.
That’s not to say that blogs do not have standards. A blog post does not have the same criteria, expectations, audience, requirements, or intent as any academic assignment.
But I expect that when I click on something, that it’s worth my time and I won’t regret it.
That means, for me, that it has to be interesting, that it can’t feel too short or too quick (regardless of its actual length) and so on.
When it comes to spelling, a few typos here and there don’t bother me so much. Someone is going to point that out and if the author really cares, he or she will fix that.
But when it impacts the actual readability of the article and becomes too vague or jumps around so much I can’t follow it without having to re-read it a bunch of times or I start noticing the article more than the article’s content … well, that’s frustrating. It’s so easy to fix, too.
Spellcheck does that for you, there’s really no excuse not to copy and paste it into Word and erase ninety percent of the problem.
I feel like I shouldn’t take the time to invest in something that the author clearly didn’t invest in enough to make it meet the most basic standards of English.