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Hey guys! Sorry I didn’t write anything last week; I was busy preparing for a vacation trip that I was on for the first half of this week. I also couldn’t think of anything to write about. I STILL can’t think of anything to write about in terms of an article, but I figured this would tide you guys over until I could come up with something.
1) Examine community trends: Writing on a subject that’s popular with the community will attract attention, but you have to be careful that you’re not beating a dead horse. If you want an example of beating a dead horse, just think back to the flood of teen skin rants we had here in the blogging section. This step can be ignored if you are an established blogger or excel at the attention-grabbing phase, though it's never a bad idea.
2) Write on something you care about: Unlike the previous step, THIS STEP CANNOT BE SKIPPED. If you only follow community trends, you’ll end up writing about something you don’t care about, which will make your blog seem flat and uninteresting, just like you find your topic of writing. This step is another reason it’s okay to skip the first step; if you really want to blog about something, go ahead and do it, regardless of community trends.
3) Plan out and pre-type your blog: I often pre-write my blogs in my head before I write them down on my computer, which gives me an idea of the structure my blog will fall under, as well as a few key sentences I make sure to include. Many of my blogs have never made it to PMC because I realize that I don’t have enough material as I pre-plan them. This is important. PMC’s minimum limit for a blog is 350 characters; this is not nearly enough for a quality blog, so make sure you’ve got a decent amount of content in your blog. I know you’re supposed to aim for quality over quantity, but if you can have both then that’s preferable. I also tend to type my blogs out in MS Word before copy-and-pasting them to PMC since I tend to make a lot of typos. Spellchecking in also an important step in the attention-keeping section.
1) A good title: This is surprisingly important. Consider these two titles, one being blunt and bland and the other being done in my flavour. A) An analysis of internet behavioral trends. B) The Trolls Under the Bridges: Why people behave the way they do online. Now, I probably wouldn’t read the first blog off of the title alone. The second one? Yeah, I would. They could have the exact same content, but I would never know because I don’t feel like the first one is worth reading. You want a title that sounds interesting, not dry and boring. I do this usually by way of a colourful metaphor or alluding to something that my reader-base understands. Even then, I’ve seen even cleverer titles than mine. One fellow in one of my English classes once titled an essay “Richard Rich’s Riches” and the title was completely in line with the topic of his essay. So be creative with your titles. If you wouldn’t read a blog with your title, neither would anyone else.
2) A good title card: This is important too. When I see a blog with no title card, it gives the impression that little work was put into the blog, even if the reality is that the blog is very well written and that the author just isn’t an image-editing guy. However, I think you should always strive to have at least a semi-decent title card. Even if you can’t do image editing, find something appropriate on google. That’s what I did for my return blog. A word of caution though, when picking or creating a title card: make sure that it’s simple and gets the point across. I’ve seen (and used) title cards that are noisy and not fun to look at, such as my Diamond Blog and my 1% Blog. Something like Scatterbrain’s title card is perfect, or even something as simple as my rant or rants on rants on rants…. is often good enough to make your blog look clean and professional.
1) Spelling and grammar: This is HUGELY important. If your spelling and grammar are bad, then the blog becomes hard to follow and in some cases unreadable. First off: no “text-talk.” If you don’t have time to type out your words, I don’t have time to read your blog. Next point: In English We Don’t Capitalize The First Letter Of Every Word. A little part of my soul dies inside very time I see this. Some more nitpicky things include less obvious errors such as comma splices and run on sentences. In this case, you may need someone quite proficient in English to proof-read your blog posts before you post them (which I’m more than happy to do for anyone who PMs me, BTW.)
2) Presentation: This is also important. When you do this the article becomes impossible to read. Other things not to do with text include blowing it up big or
(using unreadable fonts). PMC’s regular font, size, and color, are fine. Using the text-image style blogs are okay too, but use a simple font that’s easy to read, like in Scatterbrain. If I can’t read your blog, then I won’t read your blog. It’s as simple as that. Fancier things include breaking up your blogs into sections with headings like I almost always do, but that’s a personal stylistic thing.
3) Make the reading interesting: If an article is boring to read, then why would anyone bother to finish the article? Use interesting language, vary your sentence structure, and if you’re really fancy and have taken decent English courses, use stylistic devices, if you know how. I don’t intentionally use them, though I’m sure if an English major went picking around through my blogs he’d find enough to write a commentary book on. But I digress. This is the hardest point to teach, because as I say about essay writing in school, you can either write or you can’t, and I’m not an English teacher; I have no idea how to teach good writing. But it’s still important.
… and that’s it! I know it’s rather lengthy, but this is the kind of work that goes into my bogs and (I’m assuming) other blogs of high excellence. Hope you guys enjoyed (diamond if you did) and subscribe if you want to see more!
Oh, and I really will edit your work if you want me to.
Until next week,
Enraric out.
Writing a great blog that’ll get those diamonds is a multi-step process, but it can be broken down into three sections: preparation, attention-grabbing, and attention-keeping. I’ll go over each section in this tutorial today, as well as the steps that make up each section.
Preparation:
This is more important that you might think. Without preparation, you may get into writing your blog and end up having much less to say that you originally thought. On top of this, you need to decide on a good topic that people want to read about. Here are my steps for preparation:
1) Examine community trends: Writing on a subject that’s popular with the community will attract attention, but you have to be careful that you’re not beating a dead horse. If you want an example of beating a dead horse, just think back to the flood of teen skin rants we had here in the blogging section. This step can be ignored if you are an established blogger or excel at the attention-grabbing phase, though it's never a bad idea.
2) Write on something you care about: Unlike the previous step, THIS STEP CANNOT BE SKIPPED. If you only follow community trends, you’ll end up writing about something you don’t care about, which will make your blog seem flat and uninteresting, just like you find your topic of writing. This step is another reason it’s okay to skip the first step; if you really want to blog about something, go ahead and do it, regardless of community trends.
3) Plan out and pre-type your blog: I often pre-write my blogs in my head before I write them down on my computer, which gives me an idea of the structure my blog will fall under, as well as a few key sentences I make sure to include. Many of my blogs have never made it to PMC because I realize that I don’t have enough material as I pre-plan them. This is important. PMC’s minimum limit for a blog is 350 characters; this is not nearly enough for a quality blog, so make sure you’ve got a decent amount of content in your blog. I know you’re supposed to aim for quality over quantity, but if you can have both then that’s preferable. I also tend to type my blogs out in MS Word before copy-and-pasting them to PMC since I tend to make a lot of typos. Spellchecking in also an important step in the attention-keeping section.
Attention-Grabbing:
Nobody will look at your post if it doesn’t stand out. You need something to attract attention before your reader even opens up the blog. How? A good title and a good title card.
1) A good title: This is surprisingly important. Consider these two titles, one being blunt and bland and the other being done in my flavour. A) An analysis of internet behavioral trends. B) The Trolls Under the Bridges: Why people behave the way they do online. Now, I probably wouldn’t read the first blog off of the title alone. The second one? Yeah, I would. They could have the exact same content, but I would never know because I don’t feel like the first one is worth reading. You want a title that sounds interesting, not dry and boring. I do this usually by way of a colourful metaphor or alluding to something that my reader-base understands. Even then, I’ve seen even cleverer titles than mine. One fellow in one of my English classes once titled an essay “Richard Rich’s Riches” and the title was completely in line with the topic of his essay. So be creative with your titles. If you wouldn’t read a blog with your title, neither would anyone else.
2) A good title card: This is important too. When I see a blog with no title card, it gives the impression that little work was put into the blog, even if the reality is that the blog is very well written and that the author just isn’t an image-editing guy. However, I think you should always strive to have at least a semi-decent title card. Even if you can’t do image editing, find something appropriate on google. That’s what I did for my return blog. A word of caution though, when picking or creating a title card: make sure that it’s simple and gets the point across. I’ve seen (and used) title cards that are noisy and not fun to look at, such as my Diamond Blog and my 1% Blog. Something like Scatterbrain’s title card is perfect, or even something as simple as my rant or rants on rants on rants…. is often good enough to make your blog look clean and professional.
Attention-Keeping:
This is the most important step. This is the actual presentation of the body of your blog. I’ve seen many blogs do excellently in the first two categories and fall completely flat here. When that’s the case, they will fail to hold the reader’s interest, and they will just move on to another blog.
1) Spelling and grammar: This is HUGELY important. If your spelling and grammar are bad, then the blog becomes hard to follow and in some cases unreadable. First off: no “text-talk.” If you don’t have time to type out your words, I don’t have time to read your blog. Next point: In English We Don’t Capitalize The First Letter Of Every Word. A little part of my soul dies inside very time I see this. Some more nitpicky things include less obvious errors such as comma splices and run on sentences. In this case, you may need someone quite proficient in English to proof-read your blog posts before you post them (which I’m more than happy to do for anyone who PMs me, BTW.)
2) Presentation: This is also important. When you do this the article becomes impossible to read. Other things not to do with text include blowing it up big or
(using unreadable fonts). PMC’s regular font, size, and color, are fine. Using the text-image style blogs are okay too, but use a simple font that’s easy to read, like in Scatterbrain. If I can’t read your blog, then I won’t read your blog. It’s as simple as that. Fancier things include breaking up your blogs into sections with headings like I almost always do, but that’s a personal stylistic thing.3) Make the reading interesting: If an article is boring to read, then why would anyone bother to finish the article? Use interesting language, vary your sentence structure, and if you’re really fancy and have taken decent English courses, use stylistic devices, if you know how. I don’t intentionally use them, though I’m sure if an English major went picking around through my blogs he’d find enough to write a commentary book on. But I digress. This is the hardest point to teach, because as I say about essay writing in school, you can either write or you can’t, and I’m not an English teacher; I have no idea how to teach good writing. But it’s still important.
… and that’s it! I know it’s rather lengthy, but this is the kind of work that goes into my bogs and (I’m assuming) other blogs of high excellence. Hope you guys enjoyed (diamond if you did) and subscribe if you want to see more!
Oh, and I really will edit your work if you want me to.
Until next week,
Enraric out.
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your the best blogger
**Kills subscribe button*
but that got people thinking i didnt write my blog because they saw the difference between my grammer in a blog and in a comment! i was a little confused on how to handle it...