Checklists: A Blogger`s Second Best Friend - Get the Writing Right
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The first points I want to address deal more with the content as a whole than all the little details. We'll get to those details later, of course, but first, let's look at your entire blog entry. You're all excited about it; it came off so good that you think you can just hit publish, right? Wrong. Get up, get away from your keyboard for at least an hour, and then come back to it. Now reread what you wrote with fresh eyes, as if you were looking at a post written by someone else for the first time.
Surprised? Don't be. If you find some twisted grammar, poorly-made points, tangled typos, or other problems, understand that it happens to the best of us. You need to make sure that what you envisioned made it from your brain through your fingers and into your file. Every word under my byline on this site has been read twice: once shortly after I wrote it, and again when I'm specifically preparing it for publication. That second reading takes place anywhere from a day to a few weeks or months after the first one. And sometimes I still miss stuff. I know this is a bigger luxury than many of you have, but if you CAN wait, even an hour or two, and then do that second reading, it makes all the difference in the world. If you get flamed, wouldn't you rather be flamed for something you actually meant?
Let me follow that rather long point up with a short one: spell check. I don't care if I do sound like your high school English teacher this time. Slegg thinks that “Someone needs to create a plugin that has an auto-spell check function when you hit publish,” but really, that's no excuse. What's stopping you from typing your blog entry into Word or WordPerfect or Writer or some other word processing program with a spell checking function before you put it in your blogging application? Absolutely nothing.
Now that you've looked at your content as a whole, let's focus on your first paragraph. Does it grab your reader by the throat? Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but not much of one. Movies, plays, novels, stories, and similar works often start “in medias res” – in the middle of the action – so the audience will want to see what happens next. In non-fiction (and often enough, in fiction as well), whatever grabs your audience is called the hook. You should follow up strongly, but that strong beginning gives your reader a reason to pay attention in the first place. So spell out why they should bother, in the strongest appropriate terms, right in your first paragraph.
So you've looked at your post several different ways already. Now you need to look at the entire post one more time. How well does it read? Does it flow? Does it seem a bit awkward? An entry that stumbles when it is supposed to dance should make you hesitate to give it the spotlight. Leave it in the wings for a while and come back to rework it at a later date. You can't put off writing because you're not inspired, but if you think a post can be better than it currently is, sometimes it pays to let it bubble for a bit, like a good stew.
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